WAN Survival Guide: Strategies for VPNs and Multiservice Networks

Rating:
Summary: Where's the meat???
Review: Berkowitz is about the most loquacious writer that I've ever read. Sure, annalogies are helpful learning tools but Berkowitz takes it to an extreme with every chapter starting with a pointless story and nearly every paragraph using a different "cute" analogy. There are so many analogies in this book that it actually makes the subject at hand harder to learn because you'll spend to much time trying to remember every analogy. Then there's the fact that he fills additional space with pictures of his analogies (do I really need to see a two pictures of the Cheyenne Mountain operations center to understand his analogy?). In fact, the book is so full of [stuff] from Berkowitz trying to be witty that I'm sure you could fit the real information into a quarter of the pages...

Rating:
Summary: full of wisdom and interesting analogies
Review: Howard Berkowitz has a unique ability to share his wisdom and experience in a funny and memorable way so that the reader learns new information, but more importantly gains network design skills.

This book is not YAWB (Yet Another WAN Book). As any WAN engineer can tell you, the most important challenges require a broader understanding. Designing a reliable WAN requires an understanding of fault-tolerance options, QoS, and security. This book covers those topics, along with load distribution, MPLS, NAT, tunneling, and "virtualization." The Layer-7 virtualization section provides useful tips for understanding Web caches, application-specific caches, proxies, and stateful packet screening.

"WAN Survival Guide" is part of the Networking Council Series from Wiley Computer Publishing and it meets the goals of that series well. The Networking Council, which includes luminaries such as Vint Cerf and Scott Bradner, produces books that offer real-world guidance for experienced network engineers. These books don't reiterate the technical details that you can get from RFCs, vendor white papers, or reference books. Instead they present new ways of thinking about options, so that an engineer can compare and contrast technologies using business practices that the author has found useful.

I recommend this book, both because it is enjoyable to read, (especially the Schwarzenegger laws of networking), and because it is practical and unique.

Rating:
Summary: Howard strikes again
Review: LAN Administrators must feel, when they deal with WAN engineers, as though they've fallen into a Lewis Carroll adventure, where a word means whatever someone chooses it to at that particular moment. But for LANs to interconnect, they need a WAN. To conduct e-business, they need a WAN. For any business connection to the Internet, they need a WAN. This book is a guided tour through how WANs developed, how they work, and, most important to the LAN Administrator, how they can serve the needs of the LAN.

WAN Survival Guide is not too big-it doesn't delve into the relative merits of AAL5 vs. AAL1 encapsulation, nor is it too small-every major access technology into, and service offered by, WANs for LANs is addressed. These topics could be a dry, academic exercise, but (as usual) Howard Berkowitz spices the material with "war stories" of actual WAN technology assignments (and why the customers didn't really want they just asked for) and the injection of humor as a means of remembering rules (such as Schwarzenegger's Laws of Networking). The material covered includes emerging technologies, such as MPLS and POS, areas I work in daily at Nortel Networks. They are sufficiently explained that someone seeking service from a WAN can decide if they want to consider those technologies, or if they would prefer to let others go first and wait until more of the bugs are ironed out.

Networking books often contain some editorial miscues (I recall a 3-page errata list for one book which was still quite valuable, warts and all). This one is no exception. Most of the problems seem to cluster in Chapters 3 and 4, with an occasional punctuation error elsewhere. While annoying to the reader, they don't seriously diminish the value of the book for anyone who needs to connect to a WAN as more than a single-account, dial-up user. There's a lot of material covered in the 400+ pages, so don't expect to read it in a weekend. But if you want to begin to understand what's "inside the cloud" or what's beyond the Demarc, this is an excellent place to start.