Cisco's switching solution is being heralded as a breakthrough in technology, as it is much faster than routing technology and is being deployed by Internet service providers. This book presents a... This description may be from another edition of this product.
I thought a book about LAN or VLAN would be an easy and joyful read, but apparently my predominantly 10/100BaseT/router/netware/NT background find the going a bit rough. The first 3 chapters almost kill my will to continue reading, with the portion on ATM particularly hard - having not seen an ATM network before - although on my 6th attempt I manage to make some sense out of it. I would still appreciate a more thorough treatment with careful explanation with fine examples plus nice diagram to explain firstly "why ATM", then the obstacle/challenge of having data/voice/video all on the same ATM network. However, if you can understand the first 3 chapters ( which I don't ) dealing mainly with the theory part - you will see the famous Chris Lewis magic resurface on Chapter 4 when he lead you from the moment you power up a new Catalyst switch till you build a network out of it. I cannot give this book anything less than 5 stars - but from Chris Lewis I expect a dozen stars, and my disappointment is real. Interesting enough, in TCP/IP routing almost no mention is made of token ring, but this book does spend some pages on token ring VLAN. May be Chris want to try another approach in the next edition - use a real example ( which is always easier to understand than theoritical mambo-jambo) to show how ATM can marvalously integrate voice/data/video together, then explain the intricacy/theory behind ATM - instead of hitting us with some 3D model of ATM and make me wonder whether I have sufficient IQ to understand the rest of the book. Amen.
500 stars for Chris Lewis's books
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 26 years ago
I need not review this book and know straight away that it is a 5 star material. I have gone through Chris Lewis previous book "Cisco TCP/IP Routing Professional Reference" and find him a really, truely, absolutely 100% enlightening guru. I am now eating up Slattery and Burton's book "Advanced IP routing in Cisco Network" and when comparing the 2 books,I realise another important aspect of Chris's book - he included the right kind of material in one single source with appropriate chapters on FrameRelay, ISDN, IPX, bridge, how to recover password lost and upgrade IOS etc, many troubleshooting insights - one you can carry around in your car for instant help.
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