Customer Reviews

Quality of Service: Delivering QoS on the Internet and in Corporate Networks

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

 

 

I had high hopes for this book but after reading the book, it left me craving for more. I think its because of the subject matter itself. QoS is an elusive topic and the war of religious proportions between IP and ATM proponents make it even more vague at times. The first few chapters are a good introduction for someone new to the topic of QoS. The author(s) lost me on the Integrated Services topic.

As for later chapters, for example, MPLS, the description is just so so. Definately 'Switching in IP networks' by Rekhter is a mother on that topic.

Other than that, lot of editorial and spelling mistakes. Wake up Wiley Publishing! On page 83 for instance, spell checker did not catch 'theto' and 'layer 813'.

The book covers the topic area well but is difficult to get through as it is not written very well. They examples are not that great either. For example, when describing how a leaky-bucket algorithm works, they never refer to the obvious physical example. I will note that all the engineers I work with in the QoS area love the book.

QoS is one of the currently _hot_ buzzwords that upper management reads about, perhaps in InfoWeek or the like.

But what does QoS mean exactly?

Although this book (the only one of its kind as far as I know) is short on practical examples, it shines when defining the networking/business definitons (& lack thereof) in describing QoS.

I have used this book to help define the terms we use when discussing the outcome of implementing custom prioritization on a global 25K node network.

Oftentimes, in any large organization, defining a standard set of concepts is key to strategic planning - it's the old elephant/blind men story. This book helped me to define & , more importantly, manage expectations. In addition, it has proven useful in our procurement planning.

If you are looking for sample configs, then go to CCO, or Bay or whatever. In fact, if you are simply looking for configs, then you probably should not be attempting many of these CoS implementations; because, unlike router configuration, these techniques could be more appropriately termed, "router tuning".

I enjoyed the read & found it well written (I've edited several technical books). Other books will be written concerning this topic, as QoS is a rapidly moving target. Ferguson & Huston have set the baseline.

The book is badly written both in terms of style and contents. Every other paragraph starts with words like: "In order to understand this it is important to understand that..." or "It is essential to understand this or that". It gives the impression that the book is written in the wrong order. A glance at the table of contents reveals that there's no logical sensible order to this book anyway. The heavy English style and the lack of logical organization make this book utterly useless. To add insult to injury the content is rather shallow - there's a severe lack of details and methodical introductions. For example: In the chapter on QOS measurement you read some general statements and truisms about measuring software performance but no real details of methods for doing it. If you wish to perform some measurments this book won't give you a decent start. The only tip they give is that your measurements' accuracy is limited by the uncertainty principle of Heizenberg (sp?), brought to you directly from the heart of Quantum theory. It is difficult to extract real hard, usable info from this book. I've read a lot on this subject and I'm a veteran of text-books in general and I gotta tell you kids: You'll have to wait a bit longer for a good text on this subject. At this time, this is the only textbook on QOS and related subjects (to my knowledge). Unfortunately, I can't even recommend it as an "executive summary" of the subject due to the poor presentation. Of course, I'm only one reader but I paid real money for that book intending to learn about QOS and policy and was deeply disappointed. *Yoram

This book is a perfect example of the old adage : "When you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Even without reading the back cover, it is obvious that the authors come from an IP background and see quality of service almost entirely in terms of how to adapt IP to have QoS.

Although the concept of QoS essentially started with ATM, the authors devote only about 10% of the book to ATM -- they spend more pages talking about the so-called "Integrated Services Architecture" than a technology that has been in use for years. Ironically, the book spends half its time trying to show how complicated and unworkable ATM is, and the other half trying to find ways to make IP act more like ATM. Go figure.

Overall the book is actually a very good technical treatise, but I lost a lot of respect for the authors when about halfway through the book they began to make their prejudices (ignorance?) about ATM known. Although I wouldn't return the book to Amazon, I would caution that this book is written by IP people for IP people, and the treatment of ATM borders on propaganda.

I had high hopes for this book but after reading the book, it left me craving for more. I think its because of the subject matter itself. QoS is an elusive topic and the war of religious proportions between IP and ATM proponents make it even more vague at times. The first few chapters are a good introduction for someone new to the topic of QoS. The author(s) lost me on the Integrated Services topic.

As for later chapters, for example, MPLS, the description is just so so. Definately 'Switching in IP networks' by Rekhter is a mother on that topic.

Other than that, lot of editorial and spelling mistakes. Wake up Wiley Publishing! On page 83 for instance, spell checker did not catch 'theto' and 'layer 813'.

I need the mean of QoS internet, aplications, traffic, RSVP