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Professor Creates His Own Cisco Manual
yootje writes "ZDnet is running a story about a professor who made his own Cisco networking textbook, with 800 pages: "Computing instructor Matt Basham's suggestions for improving Cisco Systems' official training manuals fell on deaf ears for years. But he appears to have the networking giant's attention now." The professor made his book available for free on his website."
It's great to hear a story about someone who took it upon himself to do what was needed. Cisco was obviously not responsive to him, so he goes out and does it on his own. Not only that, he decides to share his work with everyone. Now hopefully Cisco has the common sense not to sue him for his efforts.
DeviantArt Page
NSFWIt's a 5.1MB Microsoft Word file.
Oh the horror... The horror...
Please, Mr Matt Basham, release this as a PDF, RTF or HTML file... Anything but Word. I ma willing to help if needed.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
seams to be more about independent net publishing then about the manual cisco did not write.
I'm still wondering why the governments don't require free and "open source" text for public schools. In college, the professors used to change the text every semester so that the students couldn't sell the books back at the end of the semester (likely getting kick-backs from the text manufacturers, no doubt).
If just one state would sit down and even purchase some good works and make them freely available for modification and distribution, then the cost of education would be greatly reduced. Profs would be free to make changes at it fits their style so long as those changes are re-posted to the public. Students could read the texts online and/or print them.
What am I not seeing here?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
It's quite strange that it is not a PDF file.
but is anyone wants the 5 meg html version it here
How much of the curriculum is specific to Cisco? And if it is specific to Cisco, then isn't that sort of limiting? I'm sure you'll get a thorough grounding in TCP/IP as well, but hell, you can get that from Richard Stevens TCP/IP Illustrated Vol 1.
I've known several people who have been convinced that getting these Cisco certs will lead to untold riches - they have all been disappointed. It's definitely no substitute for a 4 year degree.
Seemed to open fine (After a while!) in OpenOffice Writer 1.1.2. Haven't opened in actual Word to compare formatting, but looks reasonable to me. No complaints here.
-m
http://www.invisik.com
Cisco has so much of the networking infrastructure market they obviously didn't care about the quality of their documentation. Luckily, there has always been a market for outsiders who can figure things out and explain them to others. Cisco would be smart to work with this guy.
They probably figured, "we can charge a ton for our cert's forever, because no one is going to take the time to write a book." OOPS! I hope other people follow suit and finally we will be rid of the "if you're not certified, you can't have learned it" business principle.
stuff |
good to see somebody doing this. I took the first semester Cisco course at my college, and yeah, the books weren't all that good. I haven't seen his work yet, but I do recall the first semester is exclusively going over the seven layers of the OSI model in sometimes painful detail. Can tend to throw the beginning student off, especially considering the OSI model is not much more than an academic tool anyway, TCP/IP is were its at in the 'real world'.
I've seen some of the initial comments here and if you notice that the price of the book is $25 for the printed version, of which Mr. Basham get's $5 (20%) and the publisher gets the rest. Honestly I don't have the time to figure out what LuLu.com's expenses might be (since I have no idea the cost of bandwidth to download 5MB), but this seems like a VERY valid business model for homegrown authors to go to. Good luck to LuLu.com and my they break open the gates of good reading at reasonable costs!!!
"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." -- Albert Einstein
I think that this is a very useful contribution to anyone who is looking for information on Cisco networking. It's definately a "middle finger" to big companies who are so set in their ways, they are unwilling to take advice from people in the field who have the qualifications and experience to make a genuine contribution to their documentation.
In many ways, it also reflects the spirit of the Free Software movement, in many respects. It reflects the frustration of a constant refusal to fix issues with something released in what is, in certain respects, a proprietary format, and the result of writing a version, which is then distributed for free. It's good to see :)
Speaking of which, I wonder if Mr Basham could be convinced to release the text under a free license, like the GNU FDL... possibly not, if he has already made arrangements with publishers, but it might be worth looking into...
Networks need manuals? I thought you just had to make sure no-one knocked the patch cables out.
http://jfin.org/jFin pure java open source financial library
Self-published textbooks will only work when some sort of feedback mechanism is in place to offer an indication of the quality of the book.
For years, at the University of South Florida in Tampa, the engineering college subjected undergraduates to an extremely poor thermodynamics text self-published by an influential department chair until the thermo scores started to slide on the state EIT exams.
Cisco Press books are, without a duobt, the best technical manuals (from a manufacturer) that I have yet read. Anyone who simply bashes on the 'networking academy' crap is doing a serious disservice to the legions of people who have progressed far beyond that simple standard of networking knowledge.
I imagine that a large number of people who have never read Jeff Doyle's "Routing TCP/IP" Vols. I & II, or Kennedy Clark's "Cisco LAN Switching" will comment about this article - read any dense technical manual by either of the above, or Bassam Halabi, or Priscilla Oppenheimer, or any non-entry level book, and see what I mean.
Besides, all of the entry-level Cisco knowledge focuses on the OSI model and BASIC network troubleshooting. If you REALLY wanted to learn that and not be led by the hand thru a technical school, you would read "TCP/IP Illustrated" by W. Richard Stevens.
A freshman calculus text is something that could easily be put on-line and into pdf format. The reason this isn't done is because the universities themselves are in collusion with the textbook publishers. The universities and professors receive kickbacks for pushing the latest overpriced dross. The racketeering term for this practice is payola.
Paging Bob Young. Are you listening?
Considering that the manual discloses methods of operating and controlling Cisco products, as well as the interfaces used by them, could Cisco sue under the DMCA for copyright theft of its instructions on how to use its equipment.
If the instructions were generated by a computer algorithim then the answer to this is a resounding yes as then Cisco would have patented 'a method by which Cisco,(us), uses a PC to and printer to generate the instructions to operate our hardware', and could then sue the good doctor as presumably he used a PC and printer too.
May the Maths Be with you!
Well, it's for CCNA which is an ok beginning. Downloading now to see if it'll help with my CCNP recert.
:-)
I got my CCNA simply to understand networking better and the environment at work. The company paid for a CCNP class so I felt I had to give it a shot and got my CCNP 5 months after the class ended. Now that I have to recert, I'm studying the Switch/Router books and, even though I didn't work as a network engineer, much of the material is familiar.
Do you know what they call someone who received the lowest passing scores on the tests? "Cisco Certified"
Shit better not happen!
How can they argue that they do not overprice their books [in the US] when you can pick the same book up in Europe, for much less. And what is really funny... it even says on them "Not for sale in the US" [because there we have this really good thing going on with the other publishers about not going below $0.2 per page EVER].
Somebody with the copy please post a mirror. The download link is not responding
Offer him your help and write it in LaTex.
Don't answer me. Moderate. Slashdot is about moderation, not discussion.
Since ./'ers like to post copies of the articles (and the subsequent karma slurpage), could someone please post the Word file here as well?
Offering a 5mb file on slashdot...
That takes balls.
Just wait till some crappy band steals your nic.
After clicking on a link below, click on "View as HTML" on the resulting page.
Preface:p college.edu%2Fstar%2Fcisco%2FMatt%2Fpreface.doc
http://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.s
Textbook:p college.edu%2Fstar%2Fcisco%2FMatt%2Ftextbook.doc *
http://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.s
It's a gigantic HTML file and may give your browser fits, but at least it's not a MS Word doc file.
[* looks like Google hasn't parsed that big doc into HTML yet, maybe they will soon now :) ]
One simple rule for its versus it's
See my other post, and mod it up. I don't need the karma points, just trying to help out.
One simple rule for its versus it's
Whoa! I think you and another poster a little further down are confusing two completely different issues. The licence under which a textbook is released has nothing to do with which version of the textbook is set as a standard.
If a textbook is released under a licence which allows it to be freely modified and redistributed, this means exactly that - it can legally be freely modified and redistributed. Any modified versions, however, will not be the textbook which was prescribed for the course.
Just because Linux is open source doesn't mean that an institution can't require all its employees to use a standardised version of it.
It's likely that respectable "upgrades" of the textbook would periodically be adopted as the new standard, but this would not happen automatically (in theory, there is no reason for it to happen automatically now, but - as other people have said - it is worth a lot of money to many people to ensure that it does).
If the author didn't make supermegabucks off every pointless, trivial change, there would be no incentive for him to make pointless, trivial changes. And there would be no incentive for other people involved to push institutions into adopting the updated version when it isn't necessary.
If I recall correctly, not too long ago some folks had the bright idea of ordering their books from Canada/UK. Seems that the same exact textbooks there cost up to 50% less than in the states.
Yeah, right.
Does the license for using / touching / seeing / feeling a Cisco router contain language that prevents dissemination of this type of info? Doesn't Oracle have a license that says you can't release benchmark information?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Just google mentifex kook for further details.
For those of you who really want this in a PDF format, I have converted it.
This is the download page, all you have to do is sign up for a free account (I only do this to prevent hot linking of files.)
I'm a designer, with some technical inclination, and frankly unless I'm engineering mission critical software, most of the concepts are not that difficult. Do this to open port xxx! So, when I needed to look at my IP Sec to understand how it needed to be programed without paying uunet to do it, I looked around for materials. There wasn't much as far as tutorials go, and uunet did do it for free anyway, but it was mostly just lines of "open port xxx." Oooh, punching holes in a firewall. But that saved me a grand, and as a small business person, this matters.
I converted the MS Word to a PDF and it is available on my school's server. They are going to hate me:
http://www.lehigh.edu/~mlt3/textbook.pdf
The good professor is really trying to study just how many people will blindly open a word doc from an untrusted source. What do you want to bet that opening the document in word triggers a counter somewhere?
I've been doing this same thing for years now....guess I just never thought to put it up on /. :-)
;-).
Several years ago, when I was studying for my certs, I decided to compile all my material into a book.
It has since grown into two separate books, one for the CCNA and one for the CCIE.
While they used to be free, I decided to begin charging a small fee (10 bux), but only enough to cover the costs of my website -- incidentally, I've never really been able to recoup that.
If anyone is interested, the books, along with loads of free material are available (both online and downloadable) at gdd.net.
Please note that I do like for folks to register, but it is free and rather painless
This is the future.. it would be nice for fields like electrical engineering, where the core material was discovered and published several hundred years ago - but you still have to pay $200 every year or so for the texts. A standard reference text that could be improved, peer reviewed, and built upon year after year would be a tremendous boon to mankind. I think of all the useless projects and questions I worked out over the years, imagine if that work went towards improving a collective body of information. Perhaps, something like another collaborative effort we know.
:-)
Yes, this won't work for everything. But things like calculus, fourier transforms, electromagnetics, classical signal processing, statics, dynamics, statistics - this is cookie cutter stuff. Should apply right through the grade schools, too. I suppose I should be thankful those things are even allowed to be taught anymore, because you can do naughty things with them.
I won't tell you how mad it made me lugging close to 100lbs of books around for 5 years when if things were sane, they could be accessed either online, or via pdf files.
If anyone wants to be a patron saint - opening those materials up would potentially help a lot of people. Books are very expensive. Moreso outside of the western world.
..don't panic
Association for Computing Machinery on Mentifex artificial intelligence
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AI has been solved.
Agents Portal selling Mentifex AI4U textbook of artificial intelligence
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Surely if you wanted to typeset / author a book these days, Word wouldn't be your first choice of editor. Especially in acadameia. Docbook, LaTeX, even the ROFF family would seem more portable in terms of generating useful output. Oh well.
Once upon a time, Word really stuggled with documents over 256 pages. I'm sure that's fixed, but what about revision control, and single point of truth? Surely it has to be a pain to incorporate all your examples in the Word document as copies of what you were really using.
Does someone have a good place to chuck it in PDF form? I'd be quite happy to render it from Word to PDF. (At least that's slightly less evil).
...roamed the earth and I was still a university student 6-10 of us used to get to gether, buy one copy of each book and take them down to the local copy shop who's owner lived off such business and hence asked did not piss and moan about copyrights. The resultant stacks of A4 sheets were then fitted in a spiral bindings. It was clunky but lasted surprisingly well and with 10-12 books at $40-100 each you usually had enough saved up over every second semester or so to upgrade your PC to handle the latest video games, drawing software math suite etc. or to buy some other small luxury like a rusty old VW Golf.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I've hosted both the PDF version and the DOC versions up on a fast FTP for a day or two. Be nice to the FTP and it will be nice to you.
/. mail servers don't wanna send me my password it seems =[
ftp://files.wgo-radio.com/ccna/
P.S. Would log in but the
Sorry, I should have indicated that I was joking.
Downloaded the thing and read a few pages... he starts almost imediately with a nono regarding websites. Screenshots of websites where to find information complete with arrows to parts of that image... nice.. What if Cisco revamps their website?
459 pages is the page count of this book... at least.. that's what MS Word 2k is telling me.
Yay, he published a textbook. It's a available as a free download! Yay!
What!??!? It's in M$ Word format! May he burn in hell, it's probably crap anyways. Why didn't he post it in PDF, HTML, XML, ASCII, or OGG format?!
Morons. The doc opens fine in OpenOffice and Wordperfect 8!
If he had posted in PDF, I'm sure there would be idiots complaining that the font size was too small, not enough colors, the professor could have read the book and recorded it as a MP3 file. The usual crap.
Pathetic. Word is the #1 word processor. Deal with it, face that fact, you probably work around in your dealing with clients, colleagues, parole officers, etc. So what's the big deal now?!
This time, logged in and ready to provide clickable links to both PDF and DOC versions of the book:
Preface
DOC version
PDF version
This reminds me of the article: "If nobody reads the manual, why are bookshops overflowing with computing books?"
The next time someone knocks the quality of Open Source documentation written by volunteers, consider the quality of the work by our professional colleagues. Grass-roots efforts like this don't prove there is a pent-up demand for technical documentation that starts from first principles.
In the meantime, someone needs to teach the good professor DocBook...
Have you heard of WikiBooks? It's an open content textbook creation site, similar to wikipedia, and is precisely intended for what you describe. It's still pretty early in terms of content development, but there's a few nice textbooks there already.
then i threw it away. this "book" teches you absolutely nothing about HOW the stuff works, liks the osi layers etc etc, what layer 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 is etc.
:o
I think students, who acctually think about doing more than just a ccna, like having knowledge that will let you explain to management why stuff works like this and that, will prefer the CCNA 1-4 v 3.0 material.
of course, its free. but its not good enough for me to consider recommending it to my friends before reccomending them to buy the whole cisco curriculum kit.
my dollar
> Grass-roots efforts like this don't prove there is a pent-up demand for technical documentation that starts from first principles.
Oops... That should have read: "Grass-roots efforts like this do prove there is a pent-up demand for technical documentation that starts from first principles."
When the "Submit" and "Preview" buttons are next to each other, accidents like this sometimes happen.
here is another mirror, on what is probably a much much faster pipe. :)
(could only squeeze 48K/sec off your school..)
... the phrases "en", "conf t", "wr mem" and many others. The good professor now owes me big time!
Superiority of open culture over corporate culture has been examplified.
Superiority of law enforcement over sane intellect will be examplified later.
There you are, staring at me again.
This post made ZERO sense whatsoever.
If I got an e-mail with this exact text my spam filter would have caught it in a heartbeat. ;p
I volunteer to print the manual out, scan it into TIFF images, tie them together, and publish it all as one big image. A mere 1Tb! Get yours now!
"If you could only see what I've seen with your eyes..." - Roy Batty
-
Lesson 1: Finding CISCO's web site.
-
Lesson 2: Opening a "MS-DOS" window on Windows 95/98. (Not an NT-family OS, even though this is a corporate networking class.)
-
Lesson 3: Installing a network card. ("Try to see how a Token Ring NIC differs from an Ethernet NIC.")
-
A little further along, there are chapters on binary arithmetic, hex arithmetic, IP addressing, and the symbols Cisco uses in their manuals.
Then, immediately after the chapter on IP addressing, things suddenly get complicated:
-
You are the network administrator for an upstart website publishing company. They have
offices in two adjacent buildings on different floors. Lately, they have realized the costs
of their individual Internet accounts far exceeds the costs of installing and maintaining a
T-1 line. As the network guru you are to design a network that will utilize FDDI between
the buildings. The west building uses floors 3, 4, and 5 for the sales and admin staff.
Here you will want to use a CISCO Catalyst 5000 with a FDDI module, a management
module, and a 24-port switch module. From there each floor will distribute access via a
CISCO 1924 switch to each of its 20 nodes (workstations, servers, and printers). The east
building uses floors 1 through 5 for the design and engineering staff. Here you will want
to use a CISCO Catalyst 5500 with a FDDI module, a management module, and a 24-port
switch module. You will also have a CISCO 2610 router with T-1 module, and a
Kentrox CSU/DSU for your full T-1 line. Your ISP, ComBase has sold you two blocks
of 62 IP addresses: 198.74.56.x (1-62) and (65-126). Combase will also provide the DNS
services, unlike most ISP's where more than 24 IP's are ordered. Design your network,
including cabling and grounds, to include all IP's, subnet masks, gateways, and anything
else you need to include.
Some quotes:This is before they've mentioned how to configure, operate or use any of that stuff. Wierd.
"Supercomputer--See Nasa, Berkely, MIT, etc. Kind of like the W.O.P.R. in Wargames."
The Word format
The PDF format
Leech away.
hes dumbed down the manual to make room for the computer illiterate..
a sepperate class
If only "computer illiteracy" were the only kind we had to worry about...
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
Seriously. People who modded that shit up: what the fuck?
I'm appalled. Not because it's a Microsoft product, but because Word does such a shoddy job of handling large files. It should have been written in LaTeX, then published as a post script or pdf. For those not familiar, Word chokes on that 5MB file. You can write entire books in LaTeX (or magazines since those technically contain more data).
Question everything
I read somewhere (but couldnt find the reference today) that some people are scanning in textbook pages for file sharing. At an average of $108 per (legal) textbook and approaching $0.50 per (legal) page, this stimulates the file sharing market. Used to be you could find reprinted textbooks (on crappy paper) in Asian cities for dimes on the dollar. Now they may be available on CD-ROMS at pennies on the dollar.
Due to the unreliability of scan-to-text conversion, this technology had to wait until the scanned page-image bandwidths were economical, i.e. shared video files paved the way. You also get the formating and figures in the page-images.
I seem to have done this a few times - although I'm surprised something as mature as Cicso routers would require it.
One of the first '3rd party' manuals I wrote was for the error handling features in Visual Workbench 3.0 for the Mac. The documentation that came with it wasn't (documentation).
Imagine for a moment a world without hypothetical situations...
Of course, that was a huge time sink, and it still did cost me about 20% of the books' price when all was said and done (quality data binders cost good money, after all). But man, after years of getting bent over the barrel by the local book cartel, it sure felt good.
Method of processing duck feet
No, no conflict of interest at all. Somehow I doubt the basic accounting principles change all that frequently. The guy was such an asshat. He routinely derided students who dared to express confusion about his lecture to his 500+ seat lecture hall.
Method of processing duck feet
He must not be from around here.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Here's the torrent link:
Torrent
Bye!
SeqBox
As I understand it, many times it's the department as a whole that chooses books for individual classes. In many cases I couldn't fathom why they were using a different edition than last semester or why they would do stuff like buy Tweedle-Deitel and Tweedle-Dumb's books on C instead of just going with the one that defined the language (C Programming Language, Standard C Library), which were more concise and cheaper!
First, kudos to the prof for doing what he thought best for his students.
Second, for those sneering at Word, I have done commercial work in Word in single files from a few bytes to over 100MB. I did it that way because my clients asked for it in that format, No other format was of interest to them nor were suggestions for alternate methods such as simple HTML considered. Their personnel could handle hyperlinks just fine in Word, thank you.
It's what your audience and clients want that counts. I did over 50 manuals for one client, all stable all successful.
Open office is a good set of apps. HTML is a good presentation method. The same applies to the application methods and applications available in Microsoft Office.
I'm retired now and moving over to Linux for fun. I don't have to satisfy any clients so fooling around in Linux is fine. Maybe someday OO will be on a par with MO. But, right now as close as OO is, it isn't quite there.
If you work with business documentation, you better know MO.
Flame away!
with Cisco Inc. Just finished Cisco Training and the class used the two Cisco Press books, (Intro and ICND) for training. The instructor made it clear that the Cisco Press books have no affiliation with Cisco Inc.
Isn't it a bit unprofessional to have adware (possibly spyware) with Rogaine advertisements in the top bar of internet explorer while documenting Cisco webpage browsing? Check out the screenshots of the webpages in his Cisco textbook "Learning by doing" and you'll know what I'm talking about...
I'm assuming the course doesn't cover how to replace your expensive Cisco gear with cheaper, more functional and secure OpenBSD boxes?
Layer 5: The Session Layer... This is the layer that says "HEY!" I want to establish a networking session. In fact, if you have internet access from your home computer then you may even see the message "establishing session" during the connection process.
That's just wrong. The OSI model is different from what actually happens in the TCP/IP protocol stack. The Presentation and Session layers aren't actually present in the real TCP/IP world, so claiming that something happens there is incorrect. That "establishing session" message is taking place either at the Application or Transport levels, but not at the non-existant Session layer.
In addition, his informal prose ("old school", "friggin", etc...) gave the book a definite unprofessional feel; some people may think the book is more accessible this way, but I felt that it was a bit sloppy.
Yeah.. off topic to know that the author of a book can't pass 4 standard tests on the topic he is teaching.. :monkey:
Heya guys,
I work for Red Hat teaching their stuff now, but before that I wrote and taught my own training course.
All of the training materials, including the full courseware, is available free from here (burn the contents of the whole lna4 dir to a CD).
I own copyright for it, you're licensed to use it under the FDL.
Mike MacCana
would've been written with LaTeX
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.