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Home Networking Simplified
When reviewing this book, the first argument you might have with the authors is exactly where to start. The authors have decided to start earlier than I feel necessary, with hooking your computer up with a dial-up ISP, something most ISPs already provide with more specific detail than can be given in this volume. There are strong arguments for having it all in one place, though, and I have to allow for that in this review.
That said, there are some simplifications and throwaway lines toward the book's beginning that I did feel were unnecessary. A good example is the discussion of bits, bytes, megabytes and gigabytes. Having defined a kilobyte as 1024 bytes, the authors then define a megabyte as 1000 kilobytes. They also claim not to understand why it is 1024 rather than 1000. Either our authors are lying, attempting a poor joke, or they are betraying an unforgivable ignorance of the binary number system. In any case it is a poor choice of throwaway line.
Once over that, there is a lot to like about this book. While it is entirely Windows-centered, so middle of the road it might well be the white line, and reliant on such routine applications as Outlook Express for its examples, it is incredibly detailed on not just what to do but why you do it.
It also has a huge number of screenshots, mainly showing the various dialog boxes and the options you need to set. Given the overabundance of dialogs in most Windows wizards, the screenshot barrage is probably overkill for many readers. Taken together with the highly approachable language and writing style, though, this makes for a book that is perfect for the absolute beginner to networking.
The drawback of the routine, middle-of-the-road approach is that the average person will quickly outgrow this book. Once you decide to use Firefox instead of Explorer and Eudora instead of Outlook, or perhaps integrate a Linux box or Mac into your home network, then this book is much less helpful.
Within its own limits though, it does cover all the bases in home networking, from connecting via dial-up or through broadband connections to building a wireless home network with shared files and printers. The authors do it in a slow, methodical manner with lots of screen shots and a great deal of explanation.
Part I covers the basics; terminology and connecting to the net. Part II covers a simple home network and file and printer sharing before finishing with broadband connections. Part III takes the network wireless. Part IV covers network security, before the final part covers more esoteric network issues such as IP telephony, media nets and gaming.
The book features frequent interjections from the computer help guys at Geek Squad. While most of these are simplistic, they often contain good advice for the uninitiated. This is a pretty good idea; it allows for some external expertise and works well quite a lot of the time, though some of the interjections came across as a little trite.
If you go to the book page at Cisco Press (which isn't, by the way, at the URL the authors give in the Introduction of the book) you can see a table of contents and an example chapter. The authors have also provided four appendices online; one devoted to binary and hexadecimal numbers, one on MAC address locking for wireless, a shameless plug for the Linksys product line, and a final one devoted to some fairly useless prognostication called "Future Stuff." All in all, I'm not sure they are a totally worthwhile addition to the book; the second on MAC address locking could have been easily added to the book if the editing had been a little tighter.
This is an almost perfect book on home networking for the person who has a Windows computer or two (and nothing else) and knows nothing. It pains me to admit that I have a number of friends who fall into this category and I would have no hesitation in lending them a copy of this book. Given the cost, I'm not sure I'd recommend this book to everyone, but I do feel that it is the perfect volume for the local library; borrowing it for two weeks while setting up the home net would be the ideal solution for people like my mate Tim, who (while a pediatric specialist) has trouble hooking up a router, or the neighbours downstairs who can't properly secure a wireless network.
I give this book a nine out of ten for its target audience, the absolute newcomer, but take off two points for the error in the URL given in the introduction and the middle-of-the-road outlook.
You can purchase Home Networking Simplified from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Instead of buying a book, trying to do your own network, buying the wrong crap that you don't need, and getting no where, pay someone from slashdot to do it. How much simpler can it get?
Scott Swezey
Linksys make great routers, they run linux, you can flash them and use them for a variety of things. Likewise I also love Cisco products, very reliable, always great performance. To hear that they put out a book on home networking makes me want to go buy a copy to stick on my shelf, just to show a little support for their book, and to lend out to people who need a little help setting it up.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
Great... my mom will read this, set up a home network, and then I'll have to support it. Does the madness ever end?!
It's nice to see they care about newcomers, but I'd rather they invested more time and effort in their wireless products. They were a nightmare to get to work, at least they were when I tried to integrate a few notebooks into an existing WLAN using Linksys wireless cards awhile ago. Has anyone else had problems with Linksys? Back then I vowed never to use Linksys products again, but maybe they have improved in the meantime. Can anyone comment?
Anything with the word 'work' in it has to be something to be avoided at all costs. Sure make it sound like fun adding the word 'net' to anyone. Do we always have to learn something new all the time. Can't we blunder blindly through life. It's more fun.
I can't believe I actually browsed your comment history to so see whether you were a troll or not!
For a wireless network you run into a lot of problems depending on if you are using 802.11b or 'g'. A section on testing what wireless networks you will be interfereing with by putting up a wireless hub would be nice. eg. wireless remotes, phones, other APs.
Or if setting up a wired network, a good chapter on wiring etiquette.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Hell yeah, I work for geek squad, and get paid 10 dollars an hour to make corparate millions, and make the managers there thousands, I hate it. I'm starting my own local computer repair place and quitting. All this agent and precinct talk is making me sick. Computer and networking support should be left to the strong mom and pop shops.
Sig: I stole this sig.
I remember an MCSE's job I took over, once upon a time. He installed a server at the office without plugging it into the switch. He thought that you needed a server to do peer to peer networking. An MCSE should know better. A home user has no chance.
To my point:
You either get networking or you don't. My beer-drinking brother is still too amazed by the whole "wireless" thing to understand it. My mother will never understand what the word "network" means.
Unless it plugs in and works by itself, it's too hard for grandma.
Seriously, what's the big deal...
I wondered that myself...
Why can't I just buy a router, plug it in and have it autosetup everything I need?
For the most part, you can. Most Cable/DSL routers these days have a reasonably secure config as the default (admittedly with horribly insecure default passwords, but since they only let you admin them from the LAN side, not too much risk there). They auto-NAT you, act as a DHCP server, and provide about as effective of a firewall as the average person could ask for.
On the computer side, assuming Joe Sixpack pretty much exclusively runs Windows - If XP detects a network card, it configures it, defaulting to DHCP. Thus, you literally can just buy a NIC, throw it in your PC, and hook it up to your shiney new Netgear/DLink/Linksys router, which in turn goes to your cablemodem, and poof, you have a home LAN.
Now, will this satisfy most "real" geeks? Hell no! But except for SSH'ing directly into my masquerading gateway from the outside, it provides 99% of the functionality and security.
There's been a "Linksys Networks: The Official Guide" since 2000 or so. First written by Kathy Ivens and Larry Seltzer, with the most recent paperback earlier this year edited by Walter Glenn.
1. Buy a 802.11b card
2. Find a neighbor with an open wap
3. Profit!
Hey, whattya know, I solved the mystery of #2.
After finally getting it configured so I could forward ports for my mail server, web server, and SSH, the router would crash anywhere between 5 and 30 minutes, and not even reboot, but just hang. Now my old Netgear would sometimes crash, but it at least had a watchdog timer and would automatically reboot, and the crashes were not that frequent, maybe once a week. This new one would crash and require me to physically power cycle it. A good firewall should not crash. The UI was also dumbed down quite a bit more than my old firewall.
After fighting it for a day I took it back to the store and replaced it with a Linksys RV042. While also being a much more expensive firewall (around $175) I found it to also be far better. Like my old Netgear, it appears to have been well built with a solid steel chasis. The new Netgear, while it looked cool, was just plastic. It has been rock solid without any hiccup since I set it up, and unlike the Netgear I could do true ACL rules, i.e. permit or deny based not just on protocol and port range, but also by IP addresses or subnets. I.e. I only want to allow SSH from a few IP addresses. I could also set logging on each ACL rule as well.
Also, I found the logging to be fairly nice as well. It supports emailing logs to me as well as logging them to the syslog daemon on my server, though I miss being able to set the time the logs were emailed on my old Netgear.
The Linksys also has IPSEC VPN support which my old Netgear also had. The new Netgear did not. While I have not yet used it, it could come in handy.
I also tried a D-Link DS-601 firewall router about a year ago but decided not to use it since the logging was better on my old Netgear. At least it didn't crash though and I think it would be more than adequate for most home users.
Now if only I could get to a bash shell on the Linksys since it is running the OpenRP Linux distribution, though sadly, unlike the wireless router, nobody has bothered yet.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
From the review: "Having defined a kilobyte as 1024 bytes, the authors then define a megabyte as 1000 kilobytes. They also claim not to understand why it is 1024 rather than 1000."
The authors don't understand that both 1024 and 1000 are used, but never (by knowledgeable people), and claim not to understand why 1024?
The reviewer also noted that the URL given in the intro isn't accurate.
To check a little on my own, I clicked on the link to Cisco Press and skimmed through the sample chapter. They mentioned http://www.scopes.com/ as a urban legend debunking site. (instead of http://www.snopes.com/)
Not only would I not check it out of the library, but if they mailed me a free copy I'd probably chuck it in the trash.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Go to store
ask person who work at store for these things
-Network cable
-Router
Buy things
Go home
call phone company
ask for DSL
get box from Phone company
trash everything but small plastic box
plug in small plastic box
plug phone cord into small hole on small plastic box
plug yellow cable into big hole on small plastic box
take yellow wire
plug yellow wire into big hole on small plastic box
plug other end of yellow wire into router
plug network cable (look like yellow cable) into computer (look like big hole on small plastic box)
plug netowrk cable into big hole on route
turn things on
you can access netork now
maybe yoyu should look at interweb
interweb is fun
I'm gunna have to disagree, I use a small wrt54g http://dchky.info/ap-aa.jpg that lives out on my balcony - it has fallen from the 10th floor, been bricked with firmware updates more times than I can remember, rained upon, dirtied up, and there it sits, working perfectly. Uptime 44 days (mostly because I updated dd-wrt)
I live and work in the Philippines, it's not exactly cold out there either.
Last time I was in the US, I could always get free internet access from any one of a list of "linksys" wifi networks. Awesome! Thanks for the free internet access linksys!