Customer Reviews

Mike's Basic Guide to Cabling Computers and Telephone in Homes and Apartments

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

 

 

This is the long awaited sequel to Mike Gorman's other book, Mike's Basic Guide to Cabling Computers and Telephones. Although a great companion edition to the author's other book, this book stands on its own.

Broken down into seven chapters that are logical, easy to read, and instructive, this book will teach you how to cable your home or apartment. It starts off with planning and site inspection for cabling your home or apartment. Every home or apartment is different, so you will need to know the basics and some interesting features on the place you will cable.

The book moves on to the tools you will need, including detailed illustrations to show you what it is even if you never heard about it before. Next are the details on how to connect the wires to punchdown blocks and patch panels. After that is instructions on how to connect the wires to connectors for cable TV, telephone, and network.

Now if you have any problems with your installation, or want to troubleshoot your current wiring, the books explains in detail some great techniques to shoot troubles.

Finally the book discusses some difficult installation problems that you may encounter and how to overcome them. Specifically, what if your house is all brick? How about sheetrock walls and ceilings? Or are you lucky enough to have a raised ceiling with ceiling tiles? No matter your situation, you will come out ahead with this book.

If you are a homeowner, apartment renter or landlord, a homebuilder or construction foreman, or even just a real estate agent, this is THE BOOK for you. Last Sunday I wired a duplex home for a 100 Mbit network. It included 5 rooms over 2 floors and it took only 4 hours! Without the techniques used from this book it would have taken three times as long.

The book is very concise and clean. I am moderately familiar with installing phone and computer network cable so it only took me 45 minutes to read the whole book. Don't let the small size confuse you though... It's easy enough for a novice to read, but a veteran who looked at your cable installation would be impressed by your work.

It has a lot of very good illustrations that take you through the most popular types of networking equipment and tools. The knowledge could easily be applied to wiring your own home, apartment or small office. It also mentions some of the techniques used for very large phone systems supporting hundreds of stations, but the most applicable writing to me is about how to take care of wire in homes, apartments and smaller to mid-sized offices. Someone who wires large companies is probably being trained through a different set of reading material... It is VERY obvious that the writter is speaking from years of cable installation experience.

It would be difficult for me to believe that anyone running cable, even a single phone line to a handful of stations in a home, wouldn't find at LEAST the cost worth of value in the book.

This is the first cabling book I've ever purchased, and I'm very happy with it. It's made clear a lot of things that the phone techs are doing at work while I'm just staring blankly at rows of punchdown blocks. Now it makes some sense!

This book has excellent diagrams and it presents information at a very basic and understandable level. It covers the very basics (what is a network interface device? what tools should I have?) all the way through suggestions for keeping your newly installed cables safe and neatly bundled. That said, there are some things that could use some work:

1) Some (really not very many) of the diagrams are a bit too small to read easily. They can be read, but it sometimes involves a bit of squinting (or I suppose I could use a sheet magnifier, but I'd rather resist that sign of aging).

2) There are occassional references to chapters and topics that don't seem to exist (e.g., reference to a discussion of terminating DB25 or DB9 connectors in chapter 9 -- there are only 7 chapters!)

3) There are some sentence fragments, typos, and other minor editorial matters, but they're generally nothing worse than mildly irritating. As a beginner, I can't really say whether they've changed the meaning of anything important.

As others have mentioned, this book can stand alone, but I think it's really at its finest as a complement to Mike's Basic Guide to Cabling Computers and Telephones (which I've since purchased; that one talks about terminating DB25 and DB9 connectors).

All-in-all, a really excellent book. Very basic, direct, and well-priced.

Three stars (or two if I were unkind) due to not basic enough in their examples.

I agree with all the of the previous reviewers, this is an excellent and comprehensive book for advanced home and office comm wiring projects. Having said that, the text is really lacking in basic wiring practices a homeowner (like me) would want to perform, like simple wiring revisions, adding an extension jack, etc.

The book is basically silent on adding an extension, tapping an existing cable to create a spur line for the extension(s). Extensions done incorrectly can cause the entire home's telephone system to be plagued with static, radio noise, cross-talk, and a number of other electrical defects. How do I know this? Our home is next to a TV and radio antenna farm with five antenna towers, two of which have candelabra-like multiple transmitters on the same tower. I attempted some uninformed mods to my phone system after which, depending on the weather outside, we picked up several radio stations on our phones. I bought this book and its more advance companion book looking for knowledge about how to add extensions properly, but got nothing for my investment. How could the author overlook these basic, meat-and-potatoes details? I don't know.

I finally hired Qwest to send out a telco technician to help me debug my work. The phone company charged us $99, but the money was well spent. Everything now works as it should thanks to a few simple techniques and practices the phone man taught me as we worked together. These could have and should have been in the book.

Summary -

Are you dealing with punch-down blocks? Building a new house or comprehensively rewiring from scratch? Totally rewiring your small business? This is the book for you.

Need to add an extension by tapping into your existing wiring? This is NOT the book for you.

although i definitely know what i am doing when it comes to cabling, and i have read more advanced books, i think that this book was quite helpful. It is great for someone who is just learning about cabling. However, there were quite a few typos (there's a newspaper editor for you!), and some of the drawings were too small. In all, I thoroughly enjoyed this book!