Customer Reviews

Voice over Ip Networks

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

I made the grave mistake of purchasing this book, thnking that I would get some decent information regarding the topic of VoIP. What I received was a summarization of the differences between IPv4 and IPv6, outdated chapters on ATM (two of them, one of which the author didn't even write!) and solitations for the author's other book covering IP Multicasting. The editing of the book was absolutely the worst that I have seen - my 7th grader can edit better than this. I'm still looking for a good reference on the topic.

Unbelievable! This summarizes my frame of mind after I attempted to read this book. Major waste of resources (paper, ink, McGraw Hill employees' time, etc.) and more importantly :-) my money!

CD-ROM does NOT feature any demos or utilities. It is just a collection of pdf's and ppt's from ABL (by the way, their Director of Marketing praises the book big time in the foreword -- shameless plug), Nuera, and Telogy. You can get these files and more from these companies' Web pages. In fact, search the Web for "VoIP" and you'll be better informed, compared to reading this book.

DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK.

This is about the worst book on any of the several subjects I care about. There is NO conceptual coherence in the treatment of the subject at hand - Voice over IP. It is simply an assorted treatment of various topics like ATM, FR, networking, vocoding without any logical thread running through them. I recently bought another book (IP Telephony by Goralski) which is a much better book on this subject. Avoid this one; save both your time and money.

For a book entitled Voice over IP Networks, there is surprisingly little voice covered within. The book devotes 2-3 pages to the H.323 reccomendation. The chapter on audio codecs gets 6 pages, 2 of which are Windows screenshots.

This book is more about networking technologies and IP-- and I could reccomend far superior books on those topics. If you're looking for a book on voice over IP, save your money and pass on this one or wait for it to show up in the bargin bin.

For a book published in October of 98, this is an excellent book, as the author probably used materials from the first quarter or so of that year. However, VoIP technologies have developed very quickly, its time for a review!

I too was extremely disappointed by this book. It neither met my Marketing needs (I'm a Product Manager for a large telecommunications company) nor my technical needs (I'm a former telecommunications developer). I'm frankly surprised that there are some good reviews for this book here, as I can't see how this meets the needs of any target audience. In fact, I am going to write a complaint letter to the publisher today.

Below are more specific criticisms.

It did not job of giving the big picture of VoIP and the associated technologies at all, instead going into extreme details on some related topics (IPv4 versus IPv6, Frame Relay, ATM, etc.) without introducing their relation to VoIP or applying the conclusions to VoIP in the end. It completely missed talking about the key VoIP standards and standards bodies, such as H.323, and the potential network configurations.

In addition, this is definately the worst written and edited book I have ever purchased (and that is an aweful lot of them). Large multi-paragraph sections are duplicated, word-for-word, within 20 or so pages of each other. It has many typos, especially text that does not correspond to the figures. The text is highly repetitive and poorly ordered (many terms are only defined after being highly used in a previous section). The figures are poor too -- they frequently add little value, and many of them (especially in earlier chapters) are just PowerPoint slides that contain text that is identical to the main text. Much of the text is also clearly sales propaganda from specific vendors.

In the end, I would not recommend this to anyone. Do a search on VoIP on the web and you'll get far better information.

This is a great overall book. Clearly it is not for the techies, as their reviews attest. However, it provides a good review of the IP technologies delivering VoIP, as well as VoIP's technologies.

This book is a collection of "sounds new but already out of date" topics of ATM and IP. It has little (if not at all) about Telephony, Voice Compression, and H.323 protocol suite.

One of the worse books I ever read.

I agree to other reviewers that obviously the author does not understand anything about VoIP technologies. I think the author made this book based solely from online archives (RFC, ATM Forum, IETF, etc.). Based on his background, I think the author only has knowledge of Windows NT networks and never has a solid understanding of VoIP technologies.

If you need an introduction to VoIP technologies, I suggest you read "Carrier Grade Voice over IP" by Collins. If you are a technician or an engineer, you will find Collins' book is useful. If you are a student or someone with a little or no prior knowledge, I suggest you read "Internetworking with TCP/IP Vol. 1" by Comer before you read Collins' book.

But if you are a librarian, or your job is downloading or colleting info regarding VoIP technologies; you might consider to read this Goncalves' book. This book is more suitable for managers, marketing, sales, customer services, or archivers rather to someone who need to know the technologies themselves. This book contains overview of VoIP technologies, the jargons, and the players. This book is a little and nice one for someone who need to emphasize more on selling or buying VoIp products.

Did I buy the right book? Did I actually wait six weeks for this!?! I ordered a book called Voice Over IP Networks, and instead, I got several hundred pages of ATM and Frame Relay. Every thirty pages or so, I continuosly checked the cover to make sure I got the right book, and apparently I did. I work with this technology and there is no mention of how one goes about setting up such a network or how an operator would use the system. Well, I must say: you can't judge a book by it's cover. For now, I'll just sit here and wait for a Part II where it actually DOES talk about Voice Over IP Networks!