Cisco Networking Essentials

Very good book taking you in a very good flow by explaining the OSI and TCP/IP model in a very practical/real life way rather than being theory driven. Nice pictures. Highly recommend. I also bought Trainsignal course before reading this and I think the mixture of both is probably the best thing for good foundation in networking. I plan to give network+exam some time soon and will then update comment on how i did in the test but for now the plan is to get concepts right.

You will find everything needed to understand a network: IP addresses, protocols, hardware, ... What they are, how they work and how you can manage them. I learned about networking few years ago, and I wished to have such a book at that time. All the theory about networking is well explained, and is useful even if you don't use Cisco devices. Color schema are helpful and configuration examples also. If you plan to learn IP networking, this is the book you need.

This book is awesome anyone interrested in networking should definately read this book. I ordered 1 for myself and 2 more for friends.

This book does a decent job of introducing the reader to networking. Mr. McMillan lays out the material in a very clear and concise manner. The problem is that this book is literally riddled with all sorts of typos and errors. What's worse, these errors seem to be concentrated in areas where accuracy is crucial to the understanding of the material. If you have some background in networking, you may be able to navigate your way through them and distinguish between what's correct and what's not correct. However, for those of you who are learning the subject matter for the first time, you won't know if you're coming or going; it will totally screw up your head. In my opinion, the editorial staff that Mr. McMillan so eloquently thanked in the acknowledgements section of his book should, instead, have been rebuked for doing such a horrific job of editing; they must have edited the book blindfolded. At one point, the author deliberately instructs the reader to study a specific diagram of a network and make sure that he/she can relate the diagram to the text. The diagram is so disjointed from the text that it wouldn't have made a difference if the author substituted a diagram of the female anatomy of a frog. And, the editorial staff probably wouldn't have picked that up either. For the sheer multitude of errors and the confusion they caused, I should have given this book a 1-star rating. At the same time, had this book been edited by people who cared, Mr. McMillan's excellent presentation of the material would have earned it a 4-star or even possibly a 5-star rating.

Been my favorite tech book so far . Order a lot of Cisco books on amazon and this is the best so far. Thank you. Keep up the great work Troy McMillian.

Same old Cisco book.....like every other. I have the CCNA book by Todd but is not hard cover that is the reason I bought this one from Amazon. My general view, the book is very good... thick cover and pages which is one the reasons I like it and is smaller than the one I got......so it goes with you anywhere without loading you down. The content? explanatory..... but still same Cisco thing.

Purchased for my son. Very pleased!

I bought this book as a recommendation to dust off my rusty knowledge of the subject. I used to teach networking when it was new on NT 4.0 (LoL). To my surprise this book is from about that time in concepts. But, what bothers me the most is the unbelievable amount of typos, specially around bitmasks, network addresses and subnets specification. The coverage of the subjects is barely introductory and most of the time you are punted to a fore coming chapter for a more detailed explanation, that never happens. To read this book I'm using "The TCP/IP Guide" by Charles M. Kozierok to uncover the mistakes (but this is a very dry non-introductory reference). To give you a couple of examples: * In page 159, note "Make sure you increment your interval in the correct octet", the right most 'octet' has eleven (11) bits which make your learning experience very difficult. * In page 138, last paragraph of "Ping a computer in another LAN" it says: 'Access lists are discussed in Chapter 13, "Configuring Routers"'; but the subject never appears in chapter 13. Also, there is no 'Errata' in the suggested web site [...] I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone, specially if they are new to the subject.