Networking Bible

Barrie Sosinsky

I was very excited about this book at first, since it seemed to be almost a thousand pages of glorious information on a new topic, and the fact that it even went into the physics behind the various technologies it was teaching made it appropriate that it was called a networking bible. Unfortunately, the little gimmicks it has, like how different waves can transmit data, are heavily outweighed by the actual lack of information.

I couldn’t read the whole book, but the chapters I did read were bloated, with very little useful information. The same concepts were explained again and again, but using different terms, making it easy for a beginner to confuse what was being explained. Along with this poor presentation of the theory is a glaring absence of actual practical material. The only part of the book that could be considered practical is a list of commands you can use to troubleshoot your network, but even this is made redundant as the author has not made it clear how to set up a network to a stage where you would need to troubleshoot it.

All in all, the book easily be cut down to a quarter of its original size with no information being lost, and should really be cut down even further, so it could be simply named Networking Physics, as this seems to be the only thing this book presents well.

Very little useful information.

Clarity of information: 2/10
Cohesion of information: 7/10
Practicality of information: 2/10
Ease of reference: 4/10

Score: 3/10

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