March 24, 2007

Home Networking Simplified Book Review

We recently purchased the book, "Home Networking Simplified", to see if this is something that our readers would benefit from. We just received it yesterday and set about the task of tearing through it to see what kind of advice it offers.

We have to say that we were extremely impressed with this book. We were expecting something so basic that even your average user would feel sorry for having bought. Boy were we wrong. This book covers so much in its 400+ pages that we kept reading, amazed at how thorough they were.

The only knock we could find about this book is that it was first published in 2005. So while the information isn't completely current, the topics and ideas covered make perfect sense. Not that much has change in those 2 years for this book to become irrelevant.

It covers everything from what is the Internet and how does it work, to what is TCP/IP to how to design your personal network. While this book is definitely geared to the average user they don't talk down to the reader. They introduce some very complex subjects, like network security( one of our passions ) and treat it with multiple sections and with a lot of depth. To be honest as we read through the book we were waiting, nay, hoping for them to do something like suggest everyone use WEP encryption or something. But to our surprise and jubilation, they explained that while WEP is an OK protocol to use, WPA and WPA2 are vastly superior.

They spend a lot of time explaining the 'why' of things and not just saying that you should do it one way because. One thing that we loved, yes we are geeks, was that when they introduced a topic like wireless networking or just your basic dial up/broadband comparison, they went into the science behind it. They wrote about the cable spectrum and which frequencies carried which data. All fascinating stuff that technically you don't need to know, but it is a nice bit of background information to store away.

So I know we said we only found one knock so we won't call this a knock, but more of an FYI. This is a book put out by Cisco press and therefor just about all the information contained within relates to Cisco/Linksys products. While not a bad thing, it just felt kind of like a big ad wrapped in a how-to book, but since we feel that the information contained in the book is so well done we don't mind it so much.

So our recommendation is that this book is great for anyone wanting to know more about how to set up their home for networking and how to keep it all secure. To learn about the hows and whys of computer networks. This book is not for someone that is a geek and has tinkered with computers for a long time. The geek will gleam no new information from this book that will help them with their network.

If you are interested you can grab one at Amazon.