Cisco? Router Troubleshooting Handbook

Normally, I wouldn't buy a text that involves Cisco routers/switches from anyone else other than Cisco Press; but, after researching the author's background (and since this was backed by IDG books, which has a pretty good record of publishing quality texts), I decided to give it a try. I was not disappointed (well, only that I didn't purchased it sooner).The book is excellent! When a book is about troubleshooting, I expect it to contain real-life situations that can help me at closing time, on a Friday afternoon. This book does not lack that, as opposed to Cisco Press' CIT guide. If you're a network engineer or administrator in-charge of administering and maintaining your Cisco environment, buy this book! I am sure you would not regret it.

I gave this as a present to a friend (who is a job-hunting "paper" CCNP). He says it's about the BEST of many Cisco books he's read. Very practical & understandable. A must-buy, esp. at the reasonable price!

I consider myself extremely lucky picking out this book from the book shop - the shopkeeper certainly did not think much of this low price item and stuff it in the miscellaneous section. The action starts from Chapter one - the author certainly feel no need to put some introductory mumble-jumble like OSI, LAN, WAN, tools, etc. - but jump right in to warming up with a few useful scenarios. From then on, case studies and scenario populate the rest of the books right up to the last page with a bit of theoritical commentary throw-in in between cases. The author even feel compelling to setup a scenario when he introduce basic command like ping,telnet,sh cdp neighbor - for those who have deal with actual lost connectivity at real customer site, you can feel the tension and relief. For my level, which is something like CCNA++ or ACRC--, I find the first half of the book dealing with layer one and two easy going, but the second half on routing protocol not so easy. Even so, because of the extensive use of scenario and case studies, I can still see the dramatic effect of the misconfiguration and watch out for it in my work, although I might not understand the fine point of theoritical operation of a particular routing protocol. I suspect that 10 years from now - while other reference might died of because better one might come out and replace them, this book - probably in its 6th or 7th edition - will shine like an icon. Rybaczyk has no equal.

Friday afternoon, 15 minutes before you start that much need vacation and guess what, you're network goes down and the routers seem to be inoperable. Get ready to spend your first day on vacation at work troubleshooting. Sound familiar? Now ready to make you life a little easier, this book is a great start.The handbook gives you the needed information about Cisco routers to allow you to make short work of the errors and get your network back up and running. The book is also a great reference for all of the Cisco exams.From troubleshooting the Data link, Physical and Network layers to troubleshooting IGRP and EIRGP, along with RIP, OSPF, and BGP the information in this book well worth the $29.99 price tag. The book gives you real world examples to follow and learn from as well as being very organized and detailed.The book is for the more advanced router technician, but anyone needing a handy reference this book is for you. For the one stop trouble shooting book you will hard pressed to find a better value for the money.

This book is well written and easy to read. It appears to be geared towards intermediate level users, and it does a good job in catering to that audience. Beginners will be lost, and CCIE candidates already know the stuff. His approach works quite well. He always starts with a simple network and lists the configuration. Then he introduces a deliberate misconfiguration and walks through the logic of how to recognize the problem, e.g. you get to see the results of misconfigured subnet masks. At least half of the book is oriented at troubleshooting ip routing protocols, IGRP/EIGRP/OSPF/BGP etc, so if you're not looking for that, it will probably be of less use. There are chapters on Trouble shooting Data link layers, but you won't find stuff on appletalk, vines, sna etc. Nevertheless, this book seems good for folks that already have some experience or for advanced users that want a quick review of common problems. For me, it was money well spent, as I actually did read it from cover to cover. That in itself is worth something, because all to often an author gives complete coverage, but the material puts you to sleep. This is a book that you'll actually read.