Vital Statistics

Title TCP/IP Addressing, Second Edition Author Buck Graham Publisher Academic Press/Morgan Kaufman Publishers http://www.mkp.com/ Copyright 2000 ISBN 0-12-295021-6 Pages 400 Price $39.95

TCP/IP Addressing

The essentials of the book are readable, well-paced, and highly instructive. Graham clearly knows his stuff and kept the book concise, pertinent and well-ordered.

The chapters are:

1. TCP/IP Overview
2. On Names, Addresses, and Routes
3. Network Devices
4. Routing
5. Common Topology Addressing
6. Addressing for Internet Connections
7. Addressing to Achieve Route Table Efficiency
8. Addressing for High Utilization of Address Space
9. Managing IP Addresses
10. Addressing for Growth and Change
11. IP Multicast
12. Mobile IP
13. IP Version 6

along with three shovelware appendices, two of which are clumsy reprints, almost utterly unformatted, directly off of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (http://www.arin.net) website. (Buck: A URL would suffice -- If readers don't have Internet connectivity, they don't need these appendices anyway.) There's also a "References" section, which cites documents available on the Web without offering URLs for these documents; for example, RFCs and IETF drafts, and also cites textbooks without offering ISBN numbers.

Graham describes in the preface his technical goals for the second edition, the most cogent among them being added material on ATM, CIDR IPv6, and mobile IP. This material, especially the IPv6 chapter, does not integrate entirely comfortably with the original text; the Mobile IP chapter is light enough that it could almost have been omitted. Then again, the subjects covered are themselves difficult to integrate into a network at this stage in TCP/IP's evolution, so we can't entirely blame the author for this.

Still, the book has an air of having almost completed its life-cycle before the time for a complete rewrite. For one thing, the Third Edition, if there is to be one, is going to have to delve more deeply into security, without which even a subject as tame as subnet broadcasts can no longer be discussed.

Yet overall, we must conclude that the author has succeeded. At the present time TCP/IP Addressing is an invaluable aid to the perplexed and overwhelmed TCP/IP network administrator, or whoever gets stuck wearing that hat around your organization. While there exist vastly more comprehensive texts on TCP/IP, I can't think offhand of a volume that offers as much eminently practical knowledge about the admin's first challenge, addressing issues, and makes it this easy to grasp.

-- Jack Woehr (http://www.softwoehr.com)

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