Customer Reviews

VPNs: A Beginner's Guide

After the first few chapters, the book get's confusing and is sometimes wrong when the author describes the process behind setup of a IPSEC VPN connection (there's a couple of places where AH is confused with ESP). Beyond that I found the book hard to follow because it lacks a broad comparison between different types of VPN's (why you would want to choose one type over another and so forth).

But even more irking was paying [item price] for a book that's full of typo's and repetitive sentences.

John Mairs starts by making sure you have a solid background in contemporary networking -- and especially, network security. From the outset, he makes sure you know how to establish a sound security architecture.

Then, it's on to the VPNs themselves. Mairs presents realistic VPN architectures for remote access, intranet, and extranet environments; covers all of the latest VPN protocols; and returns again to security with in-depth coverage of VPN cryptography and data integrity issues. In particular, there's detailed coverage of IPSec -- both concepts and implementation.

Mairs concludes by showing how MPLS makes possible more powerful, flexible, manageable VPNs -- and how you can use it to begin controlling service quality, even as your bits are being transported over the chaotic public Internet. This is the one VPN book you need to understand everything VPN.