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Rating: 
Summary: Replete with errors
Review: I am very sorry to see this book still in print and still on the virtual shelves. It is by far the worst book on SNMP I have ever read. The factual errors in this book are too numerous to detail...suffice it to say that where it deals with important aspects of SNMP and applications built on SNMP it is either wrong, misleading, or incomplete far more often than not. I posted a detailed analysis to one of the IETF SNMP lists (after trying unsuccessfully to communicate with the author) when I bought the book when it first came out. I honestly don't remember the specifics...but I am certain that this book would do more harm than good to anyone setting out to write his or her first SNMP application. Fortunately, intervening developments (such as SNMPv3, AgentX, WinSNMP, etc.) have made this book all but totally irrelevant anyway.
Rating:
Summary: Replete with errors
Review: I am very sorry to see this book still in print and still on the virtual shelves. It is by far the worst book on SNMP I have ever read. The factual errors in this book are too numerous to detail...suffice it to say that where it deals with important aspects of SNMP and applications built on SNMP it is either wrong, misleading, or incomplete far more often than not. I posted a detailed analysis to one of the IETF SNMP lists (after trying unsuccessfully to communicate with the author) when I bought the book when it first came out. I honestly don't remember the specifics...but I am certain that this book would do more harm than good to anyone setting out to write his or her first SNMP application. Fortunately, intervening developments (such as SNMPv3, AgentX, WinSNMP, etc.) have made this book all but totally irrelevant anyway.
Rating:
Summary: RFCs are more useful
Review: I've purchased any number of un-stellar computer books in my time, but this one is truly worthless. Its strongest topic is probably on building MIBs, but even there it won't help you much. If you're looking for material on building management stations or customized monitoring applications, keep looking. In numerous places, the author asserts that common belief is incorrect (e.g. "One factor not clearly understood is that there is an SNMP response to every SNMP command.") but then fails to provide the correct information. A substantial amount of ink at various places in the book is devoted to history and evolution of the standards, without an apparent tie to the subject at hand. Organization of subject matter is apparently largely random, with wild leaps from one topic to the next.It seems likely that the author has at best a fuzzy grasp of his subject matter, coupled with a some hidden agenda for the evolution of network monitoring. Apparently basic editorship was considered an unnecessary luxury, as the book is full of grammatical errors.
Rating:
Summary: RFCs are more useful
Review: I've purchased any number of un-stellar computer books in my time, but this one is truly worthless. Its strongest topic is probably on building MIBs, but even there it won't help you much. If you're looking for material on building management stations or customized monitoring applications, keep looking. In numerous places, the author asserts that common belief is incorrect (e.g. "One factor not clearly understood is that there is an SNMP response to every SNMP command.") but then fails to provide the correct information. A substantial amount of ink at various places in the book is devoted to history and evolution of the standards, without an apparent tie to the subject at hand. Organization of subject matter is apparently largely random, with wild leaps from one topic to the next. It seems likely that the author has at best a fuzzy grasp of his subject matter, coupled with a some hidden agenda for the evolution of network monitoring. Apparently basic editorship was considered an unnecessary luxury, as the book is full of grammatical errors.
Rating: 
Summary: Not much help to application developers
Review: This book gets your hopes up, then fails to deliver. The concepts are not explained clearly, the technical parts don't go into enough detail, and the grammar is shaky. On the plus side, it contains a lot of pointers to additional sources of information on SNMP.
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