Book Club
Book Review
Book Club
Title: Designing Large-Scale LANs
Author:
Publisher: O'Reilly
ISBN: 0-596-00150-9
Review:
In his book, Designing Large-Scale LANs, Kevin Dooley outlines various design methodologies and techniques for constructing a mature, robust network infrastructure. He does a good job of describing these technologies in a clear and distinct manner. While there exist individual books that go in depth on each of the topics, Dooley manages to boil down the explanation to a single unit. This allows him to discuss various protocols, tools, and design patterns.
Although I was impressed with the text, two suggestions came to mind:
- The first "real" chapter (Chapter 2, the first chapter was Networking 101 refresher) was entirely too mathematical and abstract, especially for an opening chapter. The topic of reliability is certainly important, but I found myself skipping entire sections of complex formulas. Perhaps reliability can be introduced in a more concrete fashion, leaving the mathematical discussion for an appendix.
- The book lacked any mention of real-world network equipment. Although this ensures that the book does not go out of date immediately after print, it's disappointing that the author could not discuss generalities of Cisco, Foundry, etc. Even a sample configuration here and there would tie the concepts back into the "real world".
All in all, this is a very in depth book, covering a wide range of network philosophies. As the text on the front cover ("Help for Network Designers"), this book is not aimed at the beginning engineer, rather, it does a good job of elevating a junior engineer, communicating some of the advanced topics related to large-scale, high-availability network design.
Review by:
Norman Elton
August 6, 2004
- Top -
