Customer Reviews

TCP/IP Over ATM (Prentice Hall Series in Computer Networking and Distributed)

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

 

 

If you expect to find in depth info about tcp or atm, you'll definately disapointed. This book is only good for people who don't know anything about tcp/ip or atm. (In that case, one would not buy this book). The book starts with overview of tcp/ip and atm(using 2 chapters). Then, it use one short chapter to talk about how ip is over atm. Then it talks about other things like snmp, ip multicast, etc... which I don't really interest in. Don't let the title of the book fool you. You can get much more info regarding ip over atm with any other ATM books.

On the one hand, reading this book gives a pretty good overview of TCP/IP over ATM. However, it's pretty short (just barely 200 pages altogether, with almost 40 pages of backmatter)--the price is pretty high considering the length. And, I've got serious problems with the content.

What's troublesome are the copy editing lapses. There seem to be a lot of instances where an acronym is used without first defining it--this is why it's so hard to read the source RFCs on ATM, and why a book like this could be so helpful if it were clearer. And not all acronyms are included in the glossary, making it worse. And the fact that there are a fair number of typos that didn't get caught makes me wonder how accurate the rest of the book is. Also, for example, Kercheval refers to NHRP as the "Next Hop Routing Protocol" yet the source (and the bibliography) correctly refer to the Next Hop Resolution Protocol.

Although Kercheval states in the introduction that everything will be explained clearly so that even people without an ATM background will get it, that doesn't always seem to be the case. Even so, if you really need to try to figure out the main issues related to running IP over ATM, this is probably as good a book as any now available. This would actually be a great book if it were more closely edited for accuracy, though.

This book does not get into much detail on every topic that it covers. Any book on ATM should have covered more on "TCP/IP over ATM". I didnot get much after I read this book. Therefore, I don't recommend this book.

This was my first book on ATM (after having browsed through uninteresting overly complex literature on ATM). Well this book explains the ATM basics, the concepts, LAN Emulation, Classical IP, management, the relationship with IP, etc in a highly readable manner. The content is very clear. The book also contains references to other material for the reader who wants to go deeper (like the technical specs of the ATM Forum). After reading it, I was armed with a solid foundation to be able to understand more and go on my own. There is also a good chapter on TCP performance over ATM. The book is aimed at people who are familiar with networking but don't know much about ATM, for people who want to know how it works in some detail, but not so much detail that the concepts would be buried under and not understood. So the reader won't get ALL the information, but will get a pretty good idea of how it works and where to go to learn more. For me, this book was a joy to read!

Of the nine or ten books on ATM I have read, this is the one I reach for first when I have a question about the various IP over ATM solutions. Unlike the ATM standards or most of the books derived from them, this book was obviously written by someone who has actually set up ATM equipment. You can find the answer to the things you really need to know about IP over ATM faster in this book than any other.

The material in the book touches on Sonet, IP, ATM, and other topics.

But it is not enough for a beginner and absolutely boring for any advanced reader.

I would suggest instead to read the Bible of IP "Internetworking TCP/IP vol. 1 (Comer)" and "ATM Resource Library, Volumes 1, 2 And 3 (Black, Prentice Hall)".

If those that want Sonet stuff try "Sonet and T1 : Architectures for Digital Transport Networks (Black/Waters, Prentice Hall)"