Broadband Internet Connections: A User's Guide to DSL and Cable

Rating:
Summary: Good broadband users book
Review: Pretty good book. It covers a lot more then what the average broadband user wants to know about the technology, configuration, running servers and security. The book is very easy to understand, yet almost 100% correct in all the details. Not the a book for the high technical level, but a very good book for the advanced or maybe just curious users.

Rating:
Summary: The best book on the subject
Review: This book is an excellent introduction to broadband. It manages the most difficult of tasks for a technical book: it is simple and clear enough for the beginner, while supplying enough detail to satisfy the needs (and curiosity) of advanced users. Not only is there ample theoretical detail, the author goes through the pratctical details of accomplishing different tasks in Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

It is a particularly good book when compared to the atrocious "DSL for Dummies", which takes some basic information and repeats it over and over until it achieves book length. For the same price (as of this writing), "Broadband Internet Connections", at 600 pages, covers the same basic information (in a much more clear and concise fashion) and supplements it with enough additional material to satisfy almost any broadband need.

Rating:
Summary: Very detailed. Introductory and intermediate, a good read
Review: This is an excellent book especially to get server software, such as a web server, ftp server, etc on your broadband connection. There is quite a lot of detail, for mac, PC and Linux, on setting up and configuring various types of servers. There is also a lot of good introductory and background material as well to build your understanding of the concepts and the issues.

However, you will need more than just this book, if you want to get a mail server or something more complex up and running. you can find that on the Net or as part of the software you download.

There are examples for each operating system on setting up and configuring a mail server, ftp server and web server. Game servers are covered as well.

The material on NAT, routers, firewalls, etc, i think should have all been at the begining of the book, since it is the most basic task almost everyone will need to acomplish. And I feel that NAT and networking using a computer as a router, rather than buying a hardware router, should have been near the back of the books as an advanced topic.