Customer Reviews

MPLS: Technology and Applications (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Networking)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The book "MPLS: Technology and Applications" describes the MPLS protocol, some related around it as well as the history of IP/tag switching. It is very obvious that the book is written by two experts that were very much involved in the evolution of IP/tag switching.

Almost everything you need to know about MPLS is covered in this book. The book is clearly structured and well organized and kept quite compact. The problems that led to the development of MPLS are very well explained, the introduction and chapter 2, the fundamental concepts, are clear and to the point. The following chapters, describing the two most important proprietary predecessors of MPLS are quite valuable for understanding some of the decisions that led to the definition of MPLS.

Unfortunately, the book is too theoretical and only gives an overview of the MPLS technology. Although the text is written quite well, more and better illustrations and diagrams and most of all some examples would help to understand the presented concepts much better. I admire every author that manages to write a book with 200-400 pages, but in this case I wish they would have covered some of the technical aspects, especially in the chapters about the MPLS core protocols and the QoS, in more detail.

Overall this is a good book that covers all of the important aspects of MPLS but some of the chapters are too theoretical and hard to understand without any illustrations and examples.

Who can write a better book on mpls than the guys on the forefront of this technology and defining the IETF standards. I was waiting for this sequel ever since the Switching in IP networks book.

The details about Toshiba's CSR and IBM's ARIS are narrowed down. Most of the information in the following chapters is pretty much the same as in the previous book but chapter 7 and onwards is a killer. I have not seen such a good explanation of constraint based routing, CSPF calculation and CR-LDP. Armed with this information, relevant RFCs are making whole lotta more sense to me now. Intserv and Diffserv are briefly explained but in a style that makes you say 'aaaah I get it now!'

There are some spelling and typos here and there. Signaling is mostly spelled as 'signalling'. All in all this book is a must have for anyone working on MPLS technology. I'm working on MPLS and keep this book handy at all times.

Good job guys!

This is a good introductory book on MPLS, but lacks information on design, deployment, and management. The book has two chapters on Ipsilon flow management protocol and tag switching, which seems to be overkill to explain the evolution of MPLS. However, the book is easy to read compared to reading the MPLS specs.

Anyone who has had to plow through an MPLS RFC or draft will be immediatley grateful to have this book. Practical examples and meaningful diagrams (ie not just a bunch of "clouds") help the reader gain an intuitive feel of the concepts and mechanisms behind MPLS. Since both authors are Cisco Fellows, I was hoping for more discussion on the Cisco implementation and deployment issues. But, even without that, this book is a great companion to the IETF documents and a definate must-read.

With ever increasing demand for performance, scalability and efficiency, new technologies/protocols are born with ever increasing complexity creating a fertile ground for authors/publishers to write cut and paste books. Most of these authors do not have a sound and broad enough background to describe the subject matter well. Bruce Davie and Yakov Rekther are rare exceptions. Their deep knowledge shines through the pages. It may not be the most detailed book on the market about the subject. But who can complain, when you can learn 80 percent of the technology for 20 percent of the time invested. If you want to learn about routing in general and MPLS in particular, please buy this book. I have shelf full of books buy the other authors gathering dust.

This books is right on target. It covered MPLS from beginning to end and is great for all levels. The authors did a very good job of not delving into vendor specific design or products and RFC-related gory details. This is the only placed that explained most of my questions. This is well worth the time and money. Enjoy!

It consists of consise and well organized contents from all the IETF drafts. However important topics such as LDPs are briefed and not dealt in design point of view. But it teaches you well; what is MPLS?

An excellent intro to MPLS. It covers in the first four chapters the technical reasons to develop such a technology, data (Ipsilon)and control (Cisco Tag Switching) driven IP switching technologies.

Chapters 5, 6 and 7 present MPLS standard protocols, QoS under MPLS and Constraint Based Routing for traffic engineering and other applications.

Finally, Chapter 8 covers VPN as a main application of MPLS.

It might be a little outdated now with more MPLS standards and applications has been developed that are not discussed/detailed in the book (such as Multicast support, IP-VPN, VPLS, etc).

Sherif

I am surprised that this book does not have more reviews. This is an exceptional book!! It has an easy to read style that explains very complicated concepts in a easy to understand format. I would recommend this book for students like myself trying to understand all the workings of MPLS. This book only has the theory so you will need an additional book that provides hands on configuration.

This book is simply too dated to be much help in 2008. The authors spend a lot of time on talking about the HISTORY of label switching, and about who the key players that brought the standard out. And then he describes each of the original popular non-standards (like Cisco's Tag Switching) in some detail. It seems like it takes FOREVER to actually to get something useful and relevant. And then while talking about MPLS, the authors have phrases like, "BGP and PIM would be perfectly suitable for label distribution" --- that's great. I'm glad they are theoretically ideal --- but it's just not important now if the popular vendors haven't implemented it that way (or there isn't a standard defined for that method)

I think this book might have been nice intro and useful in 2000, when it was released -- but there must be better, more updated books now.