VPNs: A Beginner's Guide

Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: Didn't know anything at first - read this book and I felt like a master..

Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: I didn't really much about VPN and after reading this book I felt like a master. I highly recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: It's okay, but very convoluted
Review: This book does a good job covering the details of the various protocols and standards used in different types of VPN's. But the same information can be pulled in nearly the same format from RFC's.

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.

Rating:
Summary: VPNs A Beginners Guide
Review: Very good book...I would recommend reading this book to anybody that is considering a VPN solution.

Rating:
Summary: Very Comprehensive
Review: Whatever your experience, wherever you stand in your deployment process, VPNs: A Beginner's Guide will get you where you need to be.

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.