Customer Reviews

Internetworking SNA with Cisco Solutions

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Network engineers who need to integrate SNA to TCP/IP should keep this book as one of their reference. The author has his expertise in legacy SNA network. I still have his famous book "Advanced SNA Networking" sitting on my bookself. This time he did not give a lot of pages to explain the SNA concepts. Instead, the book provides numerous samples to describe how to make use of Cisco routers to interconnect SNA networks. Readers who lack of mainframe experience should not have major difficutlties to read this book. A lot of network diagrams and configurations to help readers to understand. Basically, he covered all the requried topics such as SRB, DLSW+, SDLLC, STUN, CIP... I don't really learn a lot from this book, but it really serves as a good reference especially for those who support SNA.

Writing style is difficult to follow. Authors use acronyms that were not previously defined, there are syntactical errors (eg p. 338 "If a frame received at a peer from a remote peer is larger than that capable of the end station to handle"), and their whole approach is too abstract. Their configuration examples are also badly explained (eg they don't state clearly that in an RSRB over TCP configuration you have to define the local peer in the same way as a remote peer).

For configuration examples the online documentation at cisco.com (especially the technical tips) is infinitely superior. The only use I found for the book was in Part I, which is a (superficial) introduction to SNA technology.

The Introduction to SNA Networking and the Advanced SNA Networking(Professional's Guide to VTAM/NCP) by Jay Ranade and George Sackett is excellent. This book takes a more high level view of SNA while still giving you important details. SNA is not a protocol that you can digest in one sitting or by just reading about it. If you have no experience in mainframes, take the reading slowly and try to apply it to your current mainframe environment. I have worked directly and indirectly with SNA for the past 12 years and I still refer back to the Jay Ranade/George Sackett books. I think this book delivers greatly on introducing SNA, APPN/APPC and Cisco's implementation of DLUR/DLUS, DLSW+, etc.. This book is one of those books that you will read multiple times and find something new each time. Definintely a reference book as well as a good tool to use in learning SNA and teaching SNA. But again, it's not TCPIP, so take it slowly. If you find this book too difficult, then try to get your hands on the Introduction to SNA Networking by Jay Ranade and George Sackett.