Sams Teach Yourself Networking in 24 Hours

Sams Teach Yourself Networking in 24 Hours, Third Edition is very informative and very well designed to get a begginer up to speed with the networking principles.

Networking can be a frustrating experience. There used to be lots of grungy details to deal with, and all the debugging would be done on a command line. No GUIs to guide you. But here the authors hope to improve matters. Naturally, the network described in most of the book is TCP/IP, better known as the Internet. There are also brief descriptions of ATM, Token Ring, FDDI, IPX and Net BIOS. It's probably fair to say that for most readers, you won't encounter these networks anytime soon. The Internet is where most of the network buildout is happening. For the Internet itself, they don't go down to the level of detail about the various fields in a packet header. Just to give you an idea of the degree of foreknowledge you need for this book. At the operating system level, they give a balanced coverage of unix/linux networking and its counterpart under Microsoft. For diagnosis and security, there is a general exposition of good practices. The authors refrain from delving into using tools like Snort or Ethereal as part of your Intrusion Detection Systems. In fact, they don't even use the latter term (or IDS). The book is worthy as a nice first book on networking. Gets you started.

This is a very well written book for a complete begginers who are going to study networking in Uni or college and wont to be familiar with topic. However, won't give you an understanding in depth.

Hayden was entertaining and informative. This is an excellent reference for those interested in setting up home-based LANS with little or no prior experience. As an introduction to a complicated subject, Hayden succeeded in giving this reader plenty "ah-hahs" in each chapter. The book is limited in its coverage of the real world problems that make up the bulk of the networking profession, but these readers won't be trying to learn networking in 24 hours anyway. If you are going to have just one networking book on your shelf, make it this one.I will be considering other Sams books in the future.

This book was absolutely the best I've read in a while. It is down to earth and simple to understand. Matt Hayden did an excellent job of making this book readable to dummies and techies alike.