Description:
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Networking uses careful language, plenty of diagrams, and a lot of patience to explain how computers networks function. This is basically an overview of networking technologies for those new to the field. The authors cover networking theory before comparing and contrasting implementations of local area networks (LANs) on a variety of platforms. You'll find this book handy if you're trying to decide how to build a LAN in your home or office. Wagner and Negus deserve kudos for their extensive coverage of NetWare, Windows, and Unix variants. Many books of this sort cover Windows networking only, despite NetWare's huge installed base and Linux's growing popularity. In addition to explaining the functions of topologies, protocols, and hardware, the authors include considerable information--mostly in general terms--on administration, disaster recovery, and security. The downside of this broad-brush approach is that there's a shortage of specific how-to information about software. Wagner and Negus include a chapter that walks the reader through the process of setting up a small peer-to-peer LAN (a workgroup) under Windows 95 and 98. This chapter's great, but it leaves the reader hankering for a similar how-to for Linux and NetWare. The book would have been improved by additional information on setting up heterogeneous LANs. --David Wall
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