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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)
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
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.
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].
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
It eliminates the drawbacks of MS Word (can handle easily large (>500 pages) documents,
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.
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
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).
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.
here is another mirror, on what is probably a much much faster pipe. :)
(could only squeeze 48K/sec off your school..)
To some extent I can speak for Bob Young on this subject--the pricing situation with textbooks was very much the impetus for him to start Lulu.com. We are all in agreement on the problem.
Two points worth noting, however: when we (Lulu.com) talk to professors about textbook publishing, they broadly express the same concerns that you and others do about the books having become too expensive. Our experience is that professors are so interested in making cheaper books available to students that they are more likely to want to give away their IP than to sell it. From a Lulu perspective, we support their right to give it away, but if we are going to survive as a business we also hope that some authors of valuable content will charge something for their work.The other thing I would point out is that it's actually the college bookstores that prevent the textbook publishers from offering downloads of textbooks. Believe it or not, they're acting the villain in this saga to some extent by pressuring the publishers not to disintermediate sales (I think that's the right word--but you get the idea).
http://MarketingType.com
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Lesson 1: Finding CISCO's web site.
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Lesson 2: Opening a "MS-DOS" window on Windows 95/98. (Not an NT-family OS, even though this is a corporate networking class.)
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Lesson 3: Installing a network card. ("Try to see how a Token Ring NIC differs from an Ethernet NIC.")
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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:
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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."
Benchmark information is not the same as functional descriptions. There are LOTS of 3rd party Oracle books available at bookstores.
The benchmark restriction is because benchmarks are relative, and not necessarily indicative of performance. "SELECT * FROM table" is not relative. It does what it says.
The Word format
The PDF format
Leech away.
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
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.