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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 quite strange that it is not a PDF file.
but is anyone wants the 5 meg html version it here
You're exactly right about getting kick-backs, as well as the fact that they collect royalties for every book they put out. My Biology teacher is friends with the author of my Biology book (this is the reason that we use it, actually) and he has stated that to stay current with the class, you need the new book. Unless, you're really cheap, in which case, you'll need to know that Chapter Five is now Chapter Seven, and other trifle changes like that. At $100 a pop, these guys are milking college students (and their delicious scholarships) for as much as they can.
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
If you already have Word, PDFCreator can give better results.
Be sure to change it to a readable set of fonts first...non-anti-aliased text in PDFs is just plain ugly.
Also...I've noticed that sometimes opening Word documents created in OpenOffice end up with "unsupported characters" everywhere. What causes that?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
If you register at Lulu, the free download is a PDF.
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
Neither Java nor .Net are EMCA standards. C# is.
I don't know where you got your info from but Java is NOT ECMA standardized and as for .net, only the CLR and C# langauge are ECMA standardized.
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.
As the son of a university professor I know my dad and his professor friends have gotten tons of books from publishers free.
They simply see a book they like, call up the publisher and identify who they are who they work for and they have a class of 300+ stupid first year students next semester/year and the reading material is not set for this course yet.
They then drop the names of a book from a competitor and say they have recently read that. By noon the next day there is a fed ex. package with a letter listing all the benefits of this book over the competitors plus illustrating the "deal" they have with the university and what the price for the students would be and how their price would be much lower than the competitor.
Often there are additional books related to the topic "they feel would make excellent supplementary material". I have most of these books cause they get shuffled around.
And if they know a professor is using the 2nd edition of a text and the third is coming out. A copy of the third will arrive free for "review", again with a list of advantages over the old edition.
Somewhere they must have a list of professors and what they teach. They also know who teaches first-year classes cause they get the best review books.
It makes sense, one free book to convince a professor to force 300-700 students who have to buy your book. That's a good return on investment. Unethical, no not really, and lucrative in all the cool free books that they send out.
RTFA:
<quote>Before publishing the book on his own, Basham said he had contacted Cisco Press about publishing it, but it wasn't interested. After his free book appeared online last week, however, the company contacted him via e-mail requesting a meeting to discuss the program at St. Petersburg College.
Company spokeswoman Goodwin said that Cisco is always looking for ways to improve the program.
She said that although instructors are required to teach the Cisco Academy curriculum, they are welcome to supplement it as necessary. She also emphasized that none of the Cisco Academy students are required to buy any of the textbooks from Cisco.
"Cisco has a long-standing relationship with St. Petersburg College," she said. "And we have a process-oriented quality assurance program with the (Cisco) Academy where we work collaboratively with institutions to solicit feedback. We are continually making improvements based on customer needs."</quote>
Cisco obviously thinks this is as cool as most of us think it is.
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
Just as a plug, free textbooks can be found over at Wikibooks
It eliminates the drawbacks of MS Word (can handle easily large (>500 pages) documents,
Cisco's software is completely different. Add to the fact that they may not normally allow unlicensed books about their software, and you've got a sticky situation.
.Net are not ECMA standards. Sun has kept a tight grip around Java so as not to loose control over it, there are still hundreds of books available on Java.
What you're basically saying is that you cannot write about how you configure a Cisco router? What about books like these ? I would be very surprised if Cisco demanded licencse from the "Dummies" series, just as an example.
And just to add to what the others have said, Java and VB
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
That's actually a bit of a misquote...the people who come here are expected to know their way around a desktop and the internet...those are both very vital skills to succeed. We do tell them to go take the entire AS degree plan too...the A+, MCP, 2 courses in Linux, the CCNA and the CCNP (plus gen ed stuff)...Matt
Oh! Oh! I know! That the government isn't the answer to all problems?
But that's just the Libertarian in me talking.
In all seriousness, if you really think that this is a good idea consider pitching in to make it happen. I have my own project to this end, the Free Curriculum Project.
I also help out a bit with another, Free High School Science Texts.
I know that both or either project would sincerely appreciate your help.
Both are focused on High School texts. Mine is biased to the United States of America, the other is South African.
-Peter
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).
It's good to know how the OSI model works, especially when troubleshooting tricky layer 2, 3, and 4 network issues. That being said, when I took the CCNA test they only had about 2 questions on it. They were something like "Which of the following are layers in the OSI model" or something really basic like that. Anyway, my instructor had a really good way to remember the OSI model that I still remember to this day (took the class in 1997):
All People Seem To Need Data Processing.
The letters in this saying correspond very nicely with the layers in the OSI model:
Application
Presentation
Session
Transport
Network
Data Link
Physical
Hope this helps those of you studying for your CCNAs (judging by enrollment numbers in these college courses, there's a lot of you.)
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
here is another mirror, on what is probably a much much faster pipe. :)
(could only squeeze 48K/sec off your school..)
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
Keep reading...that is the stuff for the section on "Networking Fundamentals." MPLS? Come on...this is a CCNA book...that comes later in CCNP...there are tons of books out there at the CCNP and CCIE level some are good and most are bad...not too many people try to write the entry level stuff because you have such a wide audience with such a variety of learning styles...you really have to cover all the bases...later on you will see some more fun stuff like writing a pseudo-protocol inspector using ACL's and closing security holes with ACLS...that certainly does not appear in Cisco's curriculum. I do appreciate the comments...the new book has the same stuff for 95/98 because a lot of schools still use them, but I have also added a section on Windows 2K/ME/XP and one on using Knoppix. Hey, I had to start somewhere. Input is what will make this "ok" book even better! Thanks again!