Switching in IP Networks: IP Switching, Tag Switching, and Related Technologies

It is one of those few books that explains the concepts of label switching in a lucid style without confounding the readers. A must read.

This book was the first in series on the MPLS topic by Yakov and Davie, the two leading experts in the subject area. At the time this book was published, people didn't even know the term MPLS as opposed to now when it has become a latest acronym to be exploited by marketing parasites.This book gives an excellent description of different label switching techniques implemented by different vendors at the time, such as IBM, Toshiba, Ipsilon and cisco. This breaks down the chapters on vendor by vendor basis, explains their implementation and then at the end compares all the different approaches.Even though Yakov and Davie are both from cisco, you can't tell it from reading the book because they have presented the implementations in total impartiality and fairness and only judging the implementations on its technical merits.After reading the book, you'd understand fundamentals like FEC, label stack encoding, LDP and various techniques/signaling to carry label switching information.If you want to buy a book om MPLS today, you should go for the latest edition of this book, titled, 'MPLS technology and applications'.

There is no doubt about this great written book. The reason I only gave this book 4 starts is that I bought the book of "MPLS : Technology and Applications " from the same authors before this one. The coverage and contents between those two books are quite the same - Douh !. My suggestion is that just buy the "MPLS" one if you do not care about CSR and ARIS stuffs too much.

This book delivers. Outstanding discription of concepts and very good reference sites.

Outstanding descriptions and comparisons of various switching technology models. Presents the nuts and bolt of switching and what they mean in terms of performance, scalability, etc. Also, some outstanding references. Clear writing style. Tough concepts sometimes seem simplistic, until incorporated into the models. Must read.