Cisco Cookbook
by Ian Brown, Kevin Dooley

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Book Reviews of Cisco Cookbook

Book Review: Great book with some assumptions and caveats
Summary: 4 Stars

But I think before the authors throw the problems, they should start with background as to why the problems arise or what the situations are that push up the problems to arise. For years-of-experience Cisco networkers, this might not a problem. But for most of us who just start to get deeper on Cisco product configuration, the book kind leave us hanging.

For instance, page 162; convert between the three different formats that Cisco routers use to present mask information: standard netmask, ACL wildcards, and CIDR bit numbers. Many of us may wonder, why would someone need to do this? What is the background situation that makes this problem come up?

Another example, page 183; restrict how many paths your router can use simultaneously to reach a particular destination. The solution the authors suggest include OSPF, EIGRP, and BGP (dynamic routing protocols). The problem is that discussion on OSPF, EIGRP, and BGP comes up on next pages. So the authors expect the readers to have sufficient knowledges on such protocols. But what about most of us that only have little or no knowledge of such things but need to configure Cisco products as easy and as quick as possible?

Previous reviewer mentioned about connecting a network to two different ISPs using two routers to eliminate any single points of failure (page 327). The solution the authors suggest is to use BGP. This situation comes up usually when redundant Internet connections is needed. Yes, it can be done by BGP. But the authors never mention that deploying BGP in a network is not as easy as it looks. To run BGP, there are a lot to prepare (not to mention a lot of money to spend that only large organizations can afford). For small or medium size companies, they better use other dynamic routing protocols or just static routing with equal weight (equal cost load sharing or load balancing); which the author never mention.

When this book's 2nd edition comes up, I hopefully that the authors should consider this issue to make the book more appealing to "commoners", general audiences, and to people who just start configuring Cisco products. Also the authors should point out any problems, consequences, caveats, or requirements by running their suggested configurations. Therefore, anybody (especially the commoners) can have better understanding of the situations.

I suggest that all readers of this book should be aware one book (including this one) is never enough as single reference of all Cisco configuration problem. You should also refer to other books and literatures such as the Cisco Presses, Cisco websites, any Cisco discussion groups, and most important; your own experiments.

Summary of Cisco Cookbook

Networks, Protocols & API's Books

• Subjects > Computers & Technology > Networking > Networks, Protocols & APIs
• Software