A Necessary Rip-Off

I wholeheartedly agree with the other reviewer who was complaining about this book only having 80 pages of "new" information (the other 270 plus-or-minus pages being consumed by Appendices containing publicly available documents). I would also add that the first chapter is your basic introduction that most everyone who buys this book is already going to know, and the last Chapter is devoted to "A Practical Example" that I failed to really see a need for (though some might find it nice); so in reality, of the 80 pages of real text, only 46 are really worth anything. From that perspective, charging $50 for this thing is definitely a rip-off. By the way, has anyone else noticed that the pages are twice as thick as most other books? Normally I'd like that, but in this case I think it's just a meager attempt to "beef up" the book and make it look like it has more information than it actually does.

However, with all that said, the bottom line is that if you are doing professional work, trying to port your client-server applications into an IPv6 environment, this book is a necessity. It contains information that is not available in 'man' pages (or at least I was unable to find it, which is why I purchased the book); and it also contains information that is "hidden" in the 'man' pages, that you'd really have to search for in obscure sections to find (the voice of experience). If all the information I need can be squished into 46 pages instead of 300, that's just fine with me (time is precious)! I just wish the unnecessary bulk would have been omitted.

The book is very poorly written. I felt like I was reading a set of handwritten notes, or comments in source code, rather than a book. The sentences are very choppy, not flowing easily, etc. There are many typos in the source code examples, too. Clearly the proofreader(s) were asleep on the job.

And since the author seems to be somewhat critical of other programmers who take lazy shortcuts, with which I agree by the way, I feel it only fair to critisize him for not following his own advice. There is a difference between a "protocol family" and an "address family"; so even though, for example, PF_INET and AF_INET may translate to the same literal value, they are two different things and used in different situations. The author totally ignores the PF_xxx symbols in his book, substituting the corresponding AF_xxx symbol instead. He misuses gai_error(3) in some examples, and uses obsolete functions in others. So do _not_ follow his examples verbatum if you want to produce correct code; use his ideas, but think for yourself.

With the possible exception of one other book, this is the only book I could find on IPv6 _PROGRAMMING_. All the others seem to deal with the protocol itself (header formats, etc), or administration of an IPv6 network. If you actually need to program an application to run on IPv6, this is the book you need... well, for the most part. I'm still having a problem with an embedded system--and only on the server side--and whatever's causing it is obviously not addressed in this book. :-) For normal systems, though, this book contains all the socket API information you need.

This book contains no information on configuring an IPv6 network. For example, how to set up DNS services to translate hostnames into IPv6 addresses, how to use 'ifconfig' to enable an IPv6 network interface, etc. Nor does it talk about other ancillary items necessary for programs to work correctly. It is solely concerned with the socket API based on RFC's. I find this to be a serious drawback.

Other Reviews

• A Necessary Rip-Off
• Too many pages, not enough actual content
• all about sockets