Network Ninja

by Charlie Schluting

This book is about "the way things work." It's a quick, straight to the point reference for various networking concepts, targeted at the middle-level network engineer. Instead of memorizing tidbits of information to pass a test, gain a real understanding about the protocols and concepts you need to use. See Also: http://OmniTraining.net/networkninja * After reading Network Ninja, you will: Understand the protocols you work with, in a manner that actually makes them useful for solving real-world problems. * Be able to configure a switch, router, or OS, from any vendor, with little effort -- because you will understand what you're doing, not just one vendor's way of doing it. * Use your knowledge to explain previously mysterious phenomena. * Explain these concepts to junior network engineers, and become their mentor.

210 pages, Paperback

First published July 16, 2008

Reviews

[Miles Gould · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was so very nearly great. Unfortunately, the fact that it was self-published shows: both in the distractingly high level of typos, and (more seriously) in the sometimes confused organisation of the book. As one example, ARP is casually referred to 35 pages before it's described, without even a "(see p75)". The worked examples of subnetting were welcome, but can anyone get this far and still need an explanation of how binary numbers and bitmasks work? I'm not exactly the target audience, but it's not clear who is the target audience - people who already passed networking certification exams by rote memorisation and got themselves into big corporate network admin jobs, but don't know what the hell they're doing? I knew the hiring process was broken, but I didn't think it was that broken.

The information about physical cable types was interesting (I've never seen an optical fibre in real life!) but it would have been good to have some information about wireless networking standards. Sure, they're less relevant for datacentre operations, on which the book focuses, but they're still important in big-corporate IT (and not just home/SME networking). Thankfully, Schluting's despairing advice about coping with DDoS attacks ("There is nothing you can do") is no longer true. And if he were to produce a new edition, he could probably drop the section about classful IP networks entirely, or relegate it to a note.

Overall, though, I enjoyed this book, and learned a lot from it. It's already been a big help in my job writing network-aware software, in which I previously had no idea what the hell I was doing...