Customer Reviews

Fibre Channel: Gigabit Communications and I/O for Computer Networks

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

The Fibre Channel book by Alan Benner is an excellent book. Understanding the theory behind the Fibre Channel protocol is necessary before deploying a SAN into your infrastructure. This book gave me a look inside the protocol, from a designers perspective. Considering how technical the subject of the book is, I found the book incredibly easy to follow, and the Figures represented in the book were precise and representative of the text. This is definitely recommended reading for any System Administrator looking to stay in demand.

The "review" from the publisher merely mentions that there is a more recent edition of this book available. In reality, this old edition should be recalled, as some of the information is completely wrong. For instance, the author refrences a FC Level of 1.5. No such Level exists! Not now, not ever. The author completely made it up. If you relied on this book as a reference to prepare for a protocol-level cert exam, you would likely get many items incorrect due to this book.

I am disappointed with the presentation of information in this book. In a word, it is horrible. It sorely needs an update. It was written in 1995. That makes it about 2 generations old as far as Network Technology is concerned. That is understandable, but it gets worse from there. Figure 6.1 Defined Ordered Sets for Frame delimiters on page 95 is incorrect and violates the Fibre Channel Physical and Signaling Interface (FC-PH) revision 4.3. The figures are sloppily drawn. For example, Figure 16.3 Loop Port State Machine state diagram, simplified has graphic which covers text. Personally, I find the diagram difficult to follow; others may not. The text may be easy to follow for those familiar with Fibre Channel, however, I am using this text to learn, and I find it more confusing than other texts. I think I have written enough to convey my opinions of this book. ;[