Customer Reviews

Designing Campus Notebooks (Cisco Press Design and Implementation Series)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

The first few chapters glossed over things and barely scratch the surface. After finding many technical errors, I lost faith in this book, I am not going to finish reading the rest of it. I am disappointed at Cisco Press. Next time I will make sure I check the reader reviews first before I got suckered into it. Big waste of money!

There are so many gross technical errors in this book that I came away convinced that it had never received a serious technical review within Cisco. If so, it would never have been published.

Examples:

On page. 60, the book shows an IGMP join being propagated all the way back to a video server. This isn't how IGMP works; the only feedback a video server receives is RTCP reports. It is routing protocols that handle setup of multicast routing paths within the network, not IGMP.

On page 164, the authors talk about 10-megabyte and 100-megabyte Ethernet. Throughout the book, they confuse bits and bytes so often that it appears that the authors don't know the difference themselves.

Looking at the author qualifications, one author is a technical writer, and the other is a marketing person. Not the kind of qualifications you'd expect from authors of a Cisco Press book.

Besides the significant errors, the author(s) lack the depth of understanding and qualifications that the other Cisco Press authors typically have. Although the book was intentionally written as an overview, items are just "glossed over" so lightly that you will wonder why the book's titled "DESIGNING Campus Networks" (as designing the networks overviewed is completely out of the scope/expertise level of this book). The book is more like a "by-salespersons/for-salespersons" level book, not a design book. If you already have even moderate internetworking knowledge you will not only be bored, but also frustrated at errors at the fundamental level (scary!). This is not your typical Cisco Press quality/level book. CCIE candidates save your money...This will do you no good at all.

I thought the book would get good after I got through the Chapter 2 ARP mistake. I have read other Cisco Press books and I have found them to be written very well. This book was a big exception. The examples are painfully dull and barely scratch the surface of the issues involved with the problem. I would not recommend this book.

It's hard to believe this book went to print with Cisco's brand name on it.

The book is easy to read and has lots of current information. However, a major technical error that I saw near the beginning leads me to mistrust the whole rest of the book. The author goes into great detail to explain ARP in the section on Broadcasts, but she has it backwards, according to my understanding and the explanation in several other technical references where I looked it up to double-check.

There are so many gross technical errors in this book that I came away convinced that it had never received a serious technical review within Cisco. If so, it would never have been published.

Examples: On page 38, the authors confuse ARP with RARP, and state that ARP is used to find the IP address of a system, given the MAC address. Actually, ARP is used to find the MAC address given an IP address.

On page. 60, the book shows IGMP joins and leaves being propagated all the way back to a video server. This isn't how IGMP works; the only feedback a video server receives is RTCP reports. It is routing protocols that handle setup of multicast routing paths within the network, not IGMP.

On page 164, the authors talk about 10-megabyte and 100-megabyte Ethernet. Throughout the book, they confuse bits and bytes so often that it appears that the authors don't know the difference themselves.

On page 182, the authors talk about "Route Authentication." From the discussion, it is clear that they actually mean routing protocol authentication (i.e. OSPF authentication). However, this form of authentication only authenticates the routers themselves, but does *not* actually validate the routes.

Looking at the author qualifications, one author is a technical writer, and the other is a marketing person. Not the kind of qualifications you'd expect from authors of a Cisco Press book.

its a great book giving excellent design examples.

The ARP mistakes are the obvious problem. But there are quite a few other technical mistakes also. I questioned the likelihood of a network having 10,000 broadcasts per second. If each frame was 128 bytes, this would be more than 10 Mbps Ethernet. Also, IGMP stuff is bogus. And all mentions of calculating bandwidth usage are strange because they say things like 7 Mbytes instead of 7Mbytes/sec.

Yes, the expample she gives to demonstrate ARP and broadcast packets is actually RARP. Major Error.