Home Networking: The Missing Manual

Usually when we start learning a new piece of software or something one of the first things we like to do is find a good book on the subject and read it cover to cover. We like to know the ins and outs of something before we dive in to best prepare ourselves. When we go looking for a book on the particular subject matter at hand we invariably start by looking for one of the Missing Manual series of books. These books have great insight into a vast array of topics and so far we haven't been let down by one of them( can you feel us building to the big BUT ).

We are sorry to have to give "Home Networking: The Missing Manual" a bad review. In its defense it was written in 2005 and a lot has changed since then, but still, overall we felt it was a fairly sub par effort on their part to explain the complexities of networking your home.

We found a bunch of things in the book that we had issues with. For starters they seem to spend a lot of time on the littlest details that really have no bearing on a successful home network. For instance, when they cover how to set up user accounts for a Macintosh they seem to spend far to long talking about users, groups, images for users, etc. We felt like they could have spent far less time on this and spent more time on the actual networking of all of your computers. Throughout the rest of the book we felt that the author never really got at the meat of the matter, rather he stayed on the outside and made it a very fluffy coverage.

The one thing that this book did to completely sink it in our eyes as a book we could recommend was when describing wireless networking they said that while WPA is the better protocol for encypting your network you should stick with WEP! While he is correct that at the time WEP was a more common protocol, the flaws in WEP were widely known and WPA was clearly the better standard. Anyone who is a regular reader here knows how we feel about wireless security and this one just about made us drop the book.

The the only people that would benefit from this book would be the completely uninitiated in anything computer related. Our guess is that if you are here and reading this review then you will want to pass on this book. However if you feel like it might be something that your mom or dad might enjoy then you can pick it up from Amazon if you want.

May 29, 2007

Home Networking: The Missing Manual