Customer Reviews

CCIE Professional Development: Large Scale IP Network Solutions

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This is a must for all of you pursuing CCIE. It can also be used as a reference book even after attaining your CCIE. I have a small library of Cisco books for my CCIE preparation - and this book I rate among the top 5 must haves.

Khalid is one of the best network designers I have ever met. His book is excellent technically, and is both clear and concise. This is not a book for the faint hearted - a good knowledge of routing protocols and network design is a must. For those who are experienced network engineers, trying to "go to the next level", this is a MUST HAVE.

Editing seems to have been limited to running the text through a spell checker. Page 69 refers to "a Frame Rely network". Page 72 explains that an ISDN BRI provides "two barrier channels".

Frequently diagrams include acronyms for which no explanation is offered, as if the figure was shoveled in from somewhere else. There is no glossary of acronyms and many are missing from the index.

An entire chapter is spent on RIP1, with redundant statements about the lack of VLSM support and obsolete status.

My experience was that issues of technical sublety were as often muddied as they were explained.

There is good info in this book, too, but considering the Cisco name, I expected much better.

This book is about 560 pages long, and aproximately first 300 pages describe briefly Internet evolution and basics of IP protocols. It's a pretty interesting stuff, the content is good and style is o.k. too, but you can read it anywhere and I'd say there is nothing special there. The real value of this book in the last 260 pages. There are a few case studies, and it's something really unique. I was very surprised that I've never thought about some issues specific to very large networks. Hub and spoke network design for 800 routers is pretty much different from the 80 routers network. I think there are very few people in the world who are working on so high level and it's very interesting just to take a look at the problem examples they meet in their work.

Probably, this book won't help much in your everyday work, and probaly you'd expect more large network specific information. Of course, I wouldn't recommend you to read this book in the very beginning of your networking career. But if you 've got a strong networking backgroung and you're looking for more advanced design tutorials, this book, especially last 200 pages, would be very helpful.

Never before has a Cisco book covered so many protocols so poorly in so little space. I actually felt more confused about IS-IS after reading this book than I did before I started. The coverage of other protocols is little better. The author's frequent grammatical slip-ups render many sentances open to contracdictory interpretations. On the whole, I would recommend the CCIE Routing TCP/IP Volumes I and II before this book. There are some good chapters here and there in the book, and some good information you won't find elsewhere, but the middle chunk of the text is a waste. So much of this book is a bad rehash of what the CCNP or CCIE candidate will have already studied elsewhere as to make the reading experience as a whole discouraging.

I used this book to understand Cisco's BGP4 implementation. And I thank my lucky stars that I'd read RFC 1771 first!

Overall, this book does a good job of explaining the various knobs that Cisco supports for the protocols discussed. However, in attempting to also cover the bits and bytes of these protocols, the book makes far too many mistakes.

For instance, on page 269, when discussing BGP's UPDATE message, the book says that the Withdrawn Routes field consists of, "...<length,prefix> triples, with length being one octet, and indicates the number of octets in the prefix field." First of all, the so-called "<length,prefix>" construct is not a "triple"! Second, the length element does not indicate the "number of octets" in the prefix field, rather, it indicates the number of significant bits!

On the other hand, this book does a much better job of explaining various protocol features at a high level. In particular, its discussion of BGP4 path attributes is very good. Much better than RFC 1771 in fact!

In summary, get your bits and bytes from the RFCs and use this book to understand when to tweak the Cisco's knobs for its various protocol implementations.