BKUNDLAN.RVW 940415 SAMS Understanding Series Prentice Hall Computer Publishing 113 Sylvan Avenue Englewood Cliffs, NJ 07632 (515) 284-6751 FAX (515) 284-2607 or 11711 N. College Ave. Carmel, IN 46032-9903 or 201 W. 103rd Street Indianapolis, IN 46290 or 15 Columbus Circle New York, NY 10023 800-428-5331 or Market Cross House Cooper Street Chichester, West Sussex PO19 1EB England phyllis@prenhall.com - Phyllis Eve Bregman is postmaster 70621.2737@CompuServe.COM Alan Apt Beth Mullen-Hespe beth_hespe@prenhall.com "Understanding Local Area Networks", Schatt, 1992, 0-672-30115-6, U$26.95/C$34.95 This is a readable and fairly comprehensive guide to the concepts and terminology behind Local Area Networks. While it gives a thorough background to a wide range of LAN features, technical details are scant. This may be good news to the executive trying to get an initial grasp of networking; it may present problems to the manager charged with coming up with a plan for implementation. Three initial chapters provide basic concepts and jargon for LANs, basic parts and pieces, and connections to wide area networks. Four major network operating systems are described in further chapters, and it is nice to see some mention of OS/2 and Macintosh systems included. Chapter eight is a bit odd: of the four "other" LANs listed, two are hardware interfaces rather than network operating systems. A further three chapters look at electronic mail options, management and networkable software. The book closes with a chapter on LAN selection and appendices with vendor addresses, a glossary and a bibliography. The material is very basic and almost completely non-technical. The content will certainly help a neophyte to get started, or someone who has to "start from zero" on a major networking project. However, the lack of technical details could allow for major disasters in the choice of systems. For example, the topologies are described correctly, but the load implications of the different access methods are never discussed. An ethernet, with repeaters, could conceivably service an entire ten-storied building. With heavy loads, however, you would probably want to break that down into a series of smaller networks with routing. If response time is critical, you probably need token- ring access in order to guarantee an upper bound to delays. (The lack of detail extends to the review questions at the end of each chapter. These are extremely simple queries from the lowest level of Bloom's Taxonomy, and only serve to check whether you've read every sentence.) A possibly useful start, but far from being complete. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKUNDLAN.RVW 940415 ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Oct. '94) Springer-Verlag