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802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly Networking) Review by Joshua Davies
Very practical, little theory
This book serves as a good, practical, "how-to" guide. The first 9 chapters are a
"TCP/IP Illustrated"-style detailed look at the low-level details of 802.11, covering the format of every packet involved, when each packet is used, what each format means and how configuration parameters on both the sending and the receiving side will affect the individual packets. This is by far the most detailed, and most useful, section of the book.
Chapters 10-13, which attempt to address the theoretical side of wireless networks (and 802.11 in particular), rush through the subject far too quickly to be of any practical value - if you have a very strong grounding in electromagnetic wave theory, you might get something from this section, but if that's the case, there's probably nothing here you don't already know. The author clearly knows what he's talking about, but he tried to cram an entire book worth of material into about 100 pages. (In his defense, he acknowledges this toward the start of the section).
The remainder of the book talks about specifics of installations and looks at Windows, Mac and Linux and examines various different hardware specifications for each. This part was interesting, but hopelessly out of date (I can't imagine how anybody could write about this topic and not be out of date before the ink dried on the print).
Missing was any coverage of WPA and WPA2. Chapter 6 talks a bit about EAP and LEAP;
I suspect that WPA & WPA2 were still undergoing standardization as this book was being written. Still, the content of the book gave me enough understanding of the building blocks of 802.11 networks to make sense of the IEEE documentation on WPA.