Customer Reviews

DNS in Action: A detailed and practical guide to DNS implementation, configuration, and administration

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According to the title page of this book, it is an English translation
of a Czech book (ISBN 80-722-6675-6) published in 2003, apparently from
a manuscript completed in 2001 (based on the dates used in the
examples).

The content has not been appreciably updated, if it's been updated at
all. For example, in Section 3.5.1 and 3.5.2, the book discusses AAAA
and A6 resource records, noting "The use of the AAAA record will not
prevail in the future, though". However, the IETF moved the A6 record
to EXPERIMENTAL status in 2001 (!), effectively deprecating it in favor
of AAAA. In fact, the book is dangerously out-of-date, as it has an
extensive treatment of BIND 4 without anywhere noting that the
ISC -- the maintainer of BIND -- deprecated BIND 4 in 1997. (BIND 4 is
now widely regarded as unsafe for use in a production environment.)

The woefully dated content isn't the only problem. The translation
from Czech is sloppy, with many typographical errors and awkward
sentences. There are many artifacts from what was presumably initially
a machine translation. There are also quite a few minor inaccuracies,
and negligible coverage of security issues (other than a section on an
obsoleted version DNSSEC).

In short, I cannot warn strongly enough against this book. It's
inadequate, even as a primer. I would recommend one of these
immeasurably better books on DNS for anyone at any level
seeking to learn more about DNS:

- Pro DNS and BIND, by Ron Aitchison
(ISBN 1590594940)

- DNS and BIND (5th Edition), by Cricket Liu and Paul Albitz
(ISBN 0596100574)

When I got this book I flicked to the section on DNSSEC in order to see how up to date this book is. I was horrified to see that the whole section is based on RFC 2535. This is now obsolete and has been replaced by RFC's 4033, 4034 and 4035. These new RFC's had been out for a year by the time this book was published.