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IP Addressing Fundamentals Review by Rick Hindman
IP Addressing Fundamentals by Mark A. Sportack
IP Addressing Fundamentals by Mark A. Sportack Cisco Press ISBN 1587050676
Just recently my company reorganized our network group. My job changed drastically.
I am now responsible for supporting our Cisco wired and wireless network. Wanting to get up to speed quickly I ask one of my coworkers for advice. He advised me to learn IP addressing. He said if I got a firm foundation in IP this would give me a better understanding of Cisco switching and routing. Since we have a Cisco network I looked to Cisco Press to find a book on IP addressing. I found that they had a book by that exact name, IP Addressing Fundamentals. The book was written Mark A. Sportack. Mr. Sportack not only writes books about networking but networking is his life. He is involved in networking literally day and night. He is a Director of Network Engineering by day and a professor at Syracuse University by night.I received my book and began to read. If you are looking for a book that tells you how to configure a pc or server you have chosen the wrong book. If you need to know IP addressing inside and out this is the book for you. Mr. Sportack's style of writing made the book very easy to read. The book is divided into five parts with fifteen chapters.
This book helps you not only to understand how IP addressing works now, but how it originally worked and how it will work in the future. The author points out that when IP was in its infancy the rules and regulations worked fine but with the explosion of the internet problems soon cropped up. The author explains in each chapter what these problems were and how they were overcome to keep the internet viable. You may ask why all of this history of IP addressing and the internet are necessary. The author explains it best in Chapter Five, The Date of Doom, when he makes this statement. "The more you know about these and other constraints the better you will be able to deal with them on your job." Now this is what I look for in a book, someone who understands that I am not reading this book because I don't have anything to do, I am reading this book to help me on my job.The author covers all phases of IP addressing such as: binary mathematics, classes of addresses, fixed and variable length subnet masks, classless interdomain routing, NAT, and private addresses. Other topics cover networking with IP, DNS, and the future of IP addressing with IPv6. There are numerous examples and illustrations throughout the book that make each concept easy to understand. On a scale of one to five, I give this book a five. This book has helped me tremendously on my job. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to better understand IP addressing. Because the book was clear and easy to understand, I would be eager to read other books by this author.