Customer Reviews

The DHCP Handbook: Understanding, Deploying, and Managing Automated Configuration Services

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This book is suitable for beginners because it starts from a basic introduction to the DHCP protocol and then progressively moves to more advanced topics, taking the time to explain things in depth along the way. It covers the ISC DHCP server as well as the NT 4 DHCP server, providing examples on both products. However, this book will also delight the advanced reader since it goes way beyond the RFCs into the subtleties the protocol as well as maintaining a reliable DHCP service. If you only buy one book on DHCP, this is the one to get.

This book provides an overview of the DHCP protocol itself, which is why I bought it. Byte-by-byte, the book explains the protocol and the client/server mechanism in play. But it also goes on to provide information about hte administration of networks using several different DHCP implementations. The more advanced information includes fitting a DHCP server into a complete network sever architecture--having your server interact with a DNS server, for instance.

Unfortuantely, the book does _not_ cover the meaning of--and often, not even deep descriptions of--the underlying settings. It doesn't make efforts at suggesting useful settings, or explain the tradeoffs that each setting might make. That seems fair: if it did, the book's scope would be pulled in the direction of providing a TCP/IP tutorial, too. For that information, you'll need to buy separate protocol-specific references.

I have been so disappointed by the book -the only printing material available today for ISC DHCP. Yes. This book will teach you something, especially some theoretical stuff for DHCP. However, when you finally site down to set up your first DHCP server for your LAN, even a very simple LAN, you would find that you have learned very little from this book. DHCP should not be that hard, but the authors made it complicated and confusing by putting too much theories and too few hands-on examples in this book.

For one of the most important parts in this filed, DHCP+DDNS, the authors did not provide readers any useful syntax and examples in the very short Chapter 22. The APENDIX B "ISC DHCP Server Configuration File Reference" is also poorly written. It is not organized alphabetically, and the authors asked you to refer to the index for what you want. When I try to search the word 'ddns-domain-name', I couldn't find it in the Index. In addition, on the first page of APENDIX B, the authors gave you two broken links to make you frustrated further. APPENDIX A is "Microsoft DHCP Server Examples." Where are the examples for UNIX? We all know that configuring DHCP on NT is a piece of cake.

My general impression is that the two authors know too much theories, but seriously lack hands-on experience on TCP/IP including DHCP. The other possibility is that they don't know how to make complicated knowledge and skills simple in order to make readers understand them easily. In other words, they are not good teachers and instructors. Good teachers make complicated things simple, and poor teachers make simple things complicated.

This book should have taught you everything for setting up DHCP, but it failed. You will have to spend lots of time to search the ISC DHCP archive, and ask people the basic questions about some syntaxes. The worse thing is that this is the only DHCP book you can get on the market today. The only good thing for me was that I bought the book from an eBay auction, and did not pay the full price... . The value of this poorly written book is definitely not worth the high price.

Informative but copyright is 1999. I should have looked for an updated book on DHCP.

This book will bring you up to speed very quickly if you're a beginner. If you already know about DHCP, this book makes a good reference manual. A lot of the content is repeated from one chapter to another, keeping you from having to flip back and forth to other chapters

I have been so disappointed by the book -the only printing material available today for ISC DHCP. Yes. This book will teach you something, especially some theoretical stuff for DHCP. However, when you finally site down to set up your first DHCP server for your LAN, even a very simple LAN, you would find that you have learned very little from this book. DHCP should not be that hard, but the authors made it complicated and confusing by putting too much theories and too few hands-on examples in this book.

For one of the most important parts in this filed, DHCP+DDNS, the authors did not provide readers any useful syntax and examples in the very short Chapter 22. The APENDIX B "ISC DHCP Server Configuration File Reference" is also poorly written. It is not organized alphabetically, and the authors asked you to refer to the index for what you want. When I try to search the word 'ddns-domain-name', I couldn't find it in the Index. In addition, on the first page of APENDIX B, the authors gave you two broken links to make you frustrated further. APPENDIX A is "Microsoft DHCP Server Examples." Where are the examples for UNIX? We all know that configuring DHCP on NT is a piece of cake.

My general impression is that the two authors know too much theories, but seriously lack hands-on experience on TCP/IP including DHCP. The other possibility is that they don't know how to make complicated knowledge and skills simple in order to make readers understand them easily. In other words, they are not good teachers and instructors. Good teachers make complicated things simple, and poor teachers make simple things complicated.

This book should have taught you everything for setting up DHCP, but it failed. You will have to spend lots of time to search the ISC DHCP archive, and ask people the basic questions about some syntaxes. The worse thing is that this is the only DHCP book you can get on the market today. The only good thing for me was that I bought the book from an eBay auction, and did not pay the full price, $55. The value of this poorly written book is definitely not worth the high price.