Sixteen. Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Networking by Joe Habraken
2003, Que, 504 pages. Written in English, read in English
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Disclaimer: This is another one of those professional books, and the networking it refers to is the servers and twisted pair cables kind. If you’re not interested in these, most of the other entries in the project so far do not involve networking of any kind.
I have this habit with broad areas of knowledge related to my work, in which I would try to get to the lowest common denominator in terms of knowledge, even if I do have an understanding of some of the concepts involved. This is so that I can verify I truly understand the concepts I think I understand, and bridge gaps in my knowledge for all of the concepts that I don’t. In that regard, books like “Absolute beginner’s guide to x” or “x for dummies” are wonderful, because they state right on the cover that they’re what I need, and this book is no exception.
It is a little dated — it was written in 2003, which is a lifetime in technology terms, but the fundamentals have stayed the same — servers, while the machines themselves have improved and become much more powerful, requiring less physical machines to do more things, are still the same machines in essence, and the twisted pair cables that connect them together into a network, while improving and carrying signal faster and with less interference, still use the same RJ-45 connectors, and are essentially the same cables.
The benefit of a book like this for me, is that it puts all of the essentials in order, providing more building blocks for a deeper understanding of networking concepts and allowing me to understand how and why various elements of the networking world that I’ve had some experience with fit together. The book does attempt to provide practical information that would allow you to at least begin to set up your own network, but most of its examples and limited step by step instructions are provided for an operating system that has not been supported by Microsoft for the last three years (it’s not the book’s fault — at the point of publication, the examples were provided on a beta version of the latest networking operating system Microsoft had to offer. There probably are more updated general knowledge books about networking — this particular one had its latest edition in 2003).
The book goes from the most basic of theoretical concepts — what a network is, what kinds of networks there are, how they all connect together to create larger networks — to various aspects of practical knowledge related to network management, such as how set up different types of server in the network and why, how to restrict access to the network in order to prevent malicious usage of it, and how to troubleshoot network issues both on the software level and on the hardware level.
And after covering all of the very basic areas of networking, this book provides a great stepping stone to dig into more advanced knowledge on some of its subjects — an in depth look into how packets travel through the internet and find their way from server A to server B, or a more elaborate primer on the various ways VPN clients and servers communicate.
