Customer Reviews

The All-New Switch Book: The Complete Guide to LAN Switching Technology

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

 

 

I purchased the book in order to select a single, but higly capable switch. Did I get to know everything I needed in order to do the purchase? Definitely. Do you need about 800 pages to do this? Not really, if you have studied communication systems at university level.

The book is well written, no doubt. The author understands what is difficult in making a high performance switch, and how different features interact. Furthermore, the book deals with a multitude of standard, technologies, so that the the manager of a larger net better can understand, troubleshoot and plan his network.

This book is definitely too much for the person wanting to know what a switch is. That is not the audience. I can recommend the book for the network professional, especially for those who start as practitioners, and need a better theoretical underpinning. I do not meen 'formal language' theoretical, but who wants to understand the 'why is it like this' in switching technology.

The only reason I do not give it 5 stars, is that the book covers more than many users ever will need. The authors do explain challenging concepts in a good way, so if you like me really want to get it - get this book.

First of all, I love this book. It's well organized, an entertaining treatment of complex concepts, and a great way to get up to speed on how switches work within the context of recent history and the various standards.

But I've found what seems to me like an excessive number of typos in this new book. Mine is labeled as a Second Edition on the copyright page, but the little countdown numbers (which I think show the printing) go all the way from 10 down to 1 (so maybe it's a first printing).

They give an email to send errata to (and I've sent several - a quick check on outlook shows 7) and nobody has ever responded, so I'm not sure if they are really interested in fixing the problems or not.

In some cases, there were diagrams that were correct in the original book (at least the "books 24/7" version we have available online here), but are incorrect in the new book. (For example fig 9-8 on p. 376 has the Aggregator recieve queue (on the right) labeled as an Aggregator Transmit queue. Similar errors on page 372 and 373 in the Link Aggregation stuff. It looks like when they went to update to the new book, they failed to get the latest graphics files from the old book. There are also several internal references that don't match.

There are also section number references that are wrong (Page 36 has a reference to section 1.1.7.3 that should be 1.1.9.3, for example)

As far as I can tell, none of the typos are *real* serious, but I found the diagram errors (which went wrong from the original book) particularly troubling, as well as the lack of response from their email support address.

Apparently this review triggered a sideband contact to the author, who emailed me about the errors. Email was apparently piled up on the errata email address. They are working to make the corrections.

This is one of my favorite technical books.

While Seifert and Edwards manage to cover a very technical topic in an accessible and entertaining manner, this book isn't for everyone.

There aren't too many people actually designing a switch - there are lots more network implementors like me out there. But I find that knowing *why* hardware designers do things, and why protocol details were created is tremendously interesting, and it helps me to remember the other bits that I do need to know each day.

This book is certainly a "must have" for network engineers. It covers in details several layer two protocols, using an accesible language and some dashes of humor. The final chapter, devoted to switch design is pretty useful.

All-new Switch Book discuss features of switches, switch management and layer 2 security in comprehensive form. Many popular switch Architectural features(port mirroring, switch input/outpu flow, switch mirroring, RMON) are explained with easy-to-follow flow graphs. Also comparisons on shared LANs and switches are made through each chapter; each in various environmental contexts from edge to core. Attacks such as ARP spoofing, DHCP attacks,and man-in-the-middle attacks are mentioned without going into too much depth.

There is even a chapter on Network Troubleshooting that goes beyond layer 2 to discuss operational management of systems that extend to higher layers of the OSI. The last chapter, Make the Switch, brings together concepts mentioned in earlier chapters and provides design suggestions that a hardware designer may glean over. All-new-Switch books is recommened for those who have at least 3 years experience with enterprise switching or a Cisco certified specialist. It is not recommmended as a learner's book since the level of detail sometimes extends into switch design.
There is a lot of repetition of concepts but it's worthwhile learning.

This is a very good book about how switches work. It discusses, architecture, management, VLANs, spanning tree. Starts out basic and builds up on concepts explained in previous sections. It is very well written, easy to understand, nicely explained with good figures. I wish other authors would learn to write like Rich Seifert. Mostly geared towards how Ethernet switches work. Describes differences between bridges, switches and routers. I recommend you buy this book.