Customer Reviews

ATM, Volume III: Internetworking with ATM

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

While this book is not an introduction to ATM (it is, after all, Volume III) I was able to gain a good understanding of how ATM can work together with Frame Relay--a WAN solution I am currently implementing. I found Mr. Black's concise style to be especially helpful.

While techno-speak cannot be avoided in books of this type Mr. Black did a good job of keeping the techno-speak to the point. He did not wander into the endless technical backwaters that so many technical writers seem to love. He provided the technical content to make his point, well-illustrated with charts and diagrams to clarify and reinforce each point.

I believe this book will appeal to those who already know something of ATM and now need to know about the various aspects of internetworking with ATM: LANE, Frame Relay encapsulation, Frame Relay-ATM mapping, MPOA, Next Hop Resolution Protocol, etc. It is not so much a book of ATM how-to as it is of how it all works together.

While I swallowed hard at the price for a book this size, I believe I received good value when I consider how content-rich this book is. I rate this book at 3 and 1/2 stars.

This book is a good closure to Black's ATM trilogy. The poor writing style that characterises these books is less noticable here, with topics recieving terse yet good treatment. The inclusion of low level technical details seems less random and more to the point. The diagrams and illustrations that had previously been one of the few flawless aspects of the series show weak editing here, with typoes and mislabling on a notable fraction of them, but on the whole, the text communicates its information to the student well regardless.

Having come to the end of this trilogy, I would have to recommend that the student of ATM look elsewhere before this series for information on the topic. While Black's books may have been the best resource available at the time they were published, the choices are not so slim now. Black deserves to be lauded for his early digestion of white papers and standards into this series. Still - a month more to polish the writing would have given the books a lasting appeal that they presently lack.

The LANE chapter has numerous errors including a few that totally confuse a reader. In one place the author means multiple Lan Emulation Clients (LECs), but it is presented as "LECS". In figure 9-1, the LEC is labelled LECS, and the text has the LEC registering with the LECS! (Matches diagram, but it should be with the LES).

Wait for the next edition.