Network Warrior

Gary A. Donahue

collection of miscellaneous topics on networking and networking equipment, with an emphasis on Cisco. The purpose of this book is to fill what the author sees as holes in the Cisco documentation. The book is not intended to help the reader to configure or set up network services. Donahue gives a curious mixture of advanced and basic stuff. Some of the protocols described in this book, such as spanning tree, are enabled by default, for the very good reason that only highly experienced people should change them. On the other hand, some of the problems, like mixing public and private IPs, or accidentally configuring a switch to produce broadcast storms, are not likely to be made by even marginally-competent network people. As a source of background information, the book's not detailed enough to provide a thorough understanding of networking protocols; it's intended only as a supplement to the official docs.

The main benefit of this book is to give advice to network engineers about how to deal with management. The advice is mostly: document everything, and don't be a jerk. The writing style is mostly not too bad, except in the later chapters where the author suddenly goes all PC on us. Assumes familiarity with Cisco IOS. For a more complete understanding of routing protocols, read this book or the Cisco documentation instead.