Guide to TCP/IP, Fourth Edition

Well, look what I found the other day.

I was the "junior" person on the team that collaborated to make this edition of the classic Guide to TCP/IP possible. Ed Tittel has been with this book since the beginning and Jeff Carrell is the unsurpassed wizard of all things networking. I was lucky to even be able to contribute to this book in some small way and to work with these fine people (I haven't forgotten that Laura Chappell's name is on the cover, but truth be told, she hasn't contributed a single word to this book since the first edition).

Because this is a text book, the publisher usually wants to give "cover credit" only to people who are well-known in the field. My name only comes after a "with" on the cover (and no mention in the author's section for the book in Amazon), but it's still a feather in my cap to have my name see the light of day at all. I'm very appreciative of the authors and editors involved for allowing this kudo to go to me.

I'm really excited to see this book being published next month and I believe it represents one of my best efforts in recent years. To find out more and to order the book, go to Amazon.com (clickable link).

Book Review: Sams Teach Yourself TCP/IP in 24 Hours (5th Edition)

Author: Joe Casad
Format: Paperback, 544 pages
Publisher: Sams; 5th edition (November 4, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0672335719
ISBN-13: 978-067233571

I've been spending a lot of time with TCP/IP and particularly IPv6 in the past few months (I can't tell you why right now, but soon). When I saw Joe Casad's book Sams Teach Yourself TCP/IP in 24 Hours was in its fifth edition, I wondered how it compared to my experiences in researching various aspects of internetworking. One way to find out for sure is to request a review copy from the publisher, so here I am and here it is.

I'm a big fan of the "Sams Teach Yourself" books. I've had good experiences with them in the past and they usually offer just the right amount of learning, broken up into correctly sized bites. They also usually build one "hour" upon another so that by the end of the book, you really have learned something. There is no "who is this book for" section in the front matter, but this series is typically tailored for the beginner. How much of a beginner do you have to be? The first hour is called "What Is TCP/IP?". The first questions asked are, "What is a protocol?" and "What is a network?". Pretty basic stuff.

This series is designed, as I'm sure you guessed, to be a learning series. After the chapter's main content, there's a Q & A section and a Workshop section which is made up of a brief quiz (4 or 5 questions) and a short series of exercises. Appendix A in the back has all the answers, so you can check your work or have a peek if you really get stuck. Just for giggles, I went through the Workshop section of Chapter 14: TCP/Utilities and it seems like it's pretty standard material, if you know much about networking. Questions have to do with what commands you would use to view a computer's ARP cache or to see which hosts have made TCP connections to your computer (this all assumes a Windows PC) and exercises focused on ipconfig and ping. Not super challenging, but if the goal is to teach a networking newbie, this is at the right level.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that only one "hour" was dedicated to IPv6 (Hour 13) or that there were Exercises assigned to this chapter, but no answers for them in the Appendix. There are two good reasons for this. One is that a newbie will have their hands full with IPv4 and the other is that most folks still consider IPv6 really new (the "newness" is an illusion as IPv6 standards have been developing for years and many ISPs have accelerating their adoption of the next version of IP recently). The downside to this "neglect" in the book is that newbies are the perfect audience to learn IPv6 from scratch, at least at the level of concept. If you've got a couple of Windows 7 computers, you can ping their IPv6 addresses or ping your own localhost address (ping ::1).

On the up side, this TCP/IP book covers a lot more than TCP/IP at the level of the protocol including DNS, Routing, SOAP, Email, and "the Cloud". That sounds impressive and from the neophyte's perspective it is. However, because the book is addressed to the beginner, that's about as deep as you go into any of these topics. To be fair, that's a deep as this book should go, but that also means if you have any networking experience at all and you don't need a ground-level review, this book will be too light for you.

If you are a person who wants to learn basic networking (not particularly for how to set up two or three computers for wired/wifi in your home) with an eye on something a little more advanced like CompTIA's Network+ and a little later on Cisco's CCNA, then Casad's book will certainly give you a leg up. If that's where you are or where you want to go, I'd recommend Sams Teach Yourself TCP/IP in 24 Hours. If you have some experience and are looking for a book with more "meat" to it, you'll need to look elsewhere.

Addendum, 12-26-2011: Regarding IPv6 deployment, I just found this article at InfoWorld: IPv6 due for wide deployment in 2012, experts say

Ubuntu 10.04 Update: Networking

Not sure if this is an issue with the Lynx or with the fact that it's a VM (VMware Workstation 7). I've noticed over the past few days that networking's been spotty at best. Web pages take forever to load or the pages don't load and the connection times out. Same for twitter in twittergadget and Gwibber. Tried both the Firefox and Chromium browsers thinking it would make a difference but nada, tostada.

I'm aware that there's a wireless networking problem associated with the Lynx, but I'm using a strictly wired LAN with a DSL connection to hit the Internet. I can "refresh" the connection by rebooting the Ubuntu VM, but as of today, the connection only lasts a few minutes before it starts acting dodgy again.

Ubuntu itself is set to acquire a dynamic IP address and as a VM, it's network adapter uses NAT. The other VMs (Windows machines) aren't experiencing any similar problems. Also, my host PC and other computers on the LAN aren't having a problem. If it was just a Firefox issue, I'd suspect the problem listed at Ubuntugeek.com might be it, but not with Chromium showing the same behavior.

Any ideas?

Book Review: Head First Networking

Authors: Al Anderson and Ryan Benedetti Format: Paperback, 536 pages Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. (June 4, 2009) ISBN-10: 0596521553 ISBN-13: 978-0596521554 Head First Networking, eh? I'm familiar with the Head First series, having reviewed a number of such books before. Head First books are generally successful at teaching a technical topic to a moderately to severely distractable person. I was curious how teaching networking would fit the bill, particularly since "networking" as a technology, is so vast. Head First books tend to be beginners books, so I wasn't expecting a huge amount of detail or advanced knowledge. The typical audience for this series is late high school/early college, so I thought at best, the content would more or less map to CompTIA's Network+ certification. The authors both have "day jobs" at Salish Kootenai College, but I was surprised to discover only one of them currently works in IT. Al Anderson is the Director of Academic IT Services at the college, but Ryan Benedetti teaches Liberal Arts. I suppose one was responsible for the technical content, and the other was responsible for knowing how to write. That's just a guess, though. Actually, Benedetti was Department Head for an IT group in a previous life, according to his bio, so he does indeed know that side of the street. In the Who is this book for? section, I was surprised to see the initials "CCNA" even mentioned. Apparently, one of the goals of the book is to be a resource for students who have earning Cisco's CCNA certification as a goal. So much for my Network+ assumption. The Who should probably back away from this book? portion, does say that people who already have their CCNA or CCNP need not bother with this text, which makes sense. Like all Head First books, this one includes made up scenarios that the reader has to investigate and "solve", using the technologies featured in the book. In a programming book, and especially languages like Python or Ruby, not much is required to participate in the exercises, besides a computer that has those programs installed (and Linux has them on board by default). Having all the equipment you'd need to network even a small business would cost quite a chunk of change. The starter problem in the book's first chapter requires the reader to work on networking issues for "Coconut Airways". The first problem is the "nest of snakes in the server closet" issue (and if you've ever worked in IT at all, you know what I mean), so not much of a cash outlay at the onset. The CAT 5 cable and RJ-45 connectors seemed logical, but I was surprised to see that the authors tossed in Coaxial cable problems and solutions. I'm not sure if the current Network+ exam still includes Coax cable and BNC connectors, but I seriously doubt any real-life networks still use such antiquated cabling. In fact, CAT 5, while common, isn't the only "CAT" cabling solution a novice network tech would run into. I was beginning to wonder if the book also included Token Ring. Sure enough, it's mentioned in the index, and I was directed to page 473. Arriving on that page, I was further confused and dismayed when I arrived on said-page, only to discover the instructions for installing Wireshark on Mac OS X and Linux (Ubuntu). I did finally locate a diagram of Token Ring topology on page 471, but that technology wasn't mentioned elsewhere in the book, that I could find. I was pleased to see that Windows, Mac, and Linux were all included. After all, they all have to be networked. Certainly Ubuntu is the most commonly used Linux distro currently available (sorry Red Hat and SUSE), so it would make sense to include it for an audience that probably has limited financial means. Speaking of finances, I ran across a price list for Cisco IOS simulators, which seemed a tad advanced for a beginner's networking book. Cisco IOS commands are quite arcane, and usually basic networking is a prerequisite for even considering entering the Cisco realm. Of course, I found this in the appendix dedicated to "leftovers", or the things the book didn't really cover. A fair amount of the book covered the physical nature of networking, but packet analysis, routing (at least the concepts, if not the practice), and DHCP are also found between the covers. DNS is left for the appendix section, and even then, all that's presented is how to install BIND on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Kind of pointless, unless you teach the reader what to do with it after it's installed. Even for a ground-level beginner's book, I was a little disappointed. Too much space seemed to be dedicated to obsolete networking technologies and equipment. There were a few errors (such as the aforementioned page numbering) that I thought the editors should have caught (although that's what errata is for). All in all, this book will give the student a basic foundation in networking, but the reader will still need to pick up some additional materials and get their hands dirty making cables and networking computers, before it'll really mean anything.