Not the best Cisco Press book I've read

Let me preface this review by saying that I appreciate the difficulty involved with writing a book. I also loathe people who simply criticize the efforts of others. Finally, I have no doubt the authors are accomplished and intelligent people.

All that being said, the book was pretty bad. It adds nothing I couldn't have gotten from reading from the Cisco documentation about Unity. It was simply an overview of features and a retread of basic principles behind system maintenance.

I'm trying to think of a concise way to make this review useful to others. Rather than me list all the things that made the book not that great, I'll use two examples of other Cisco Press books that had qualities I liked and that this book lacked.

Cisco CallManager Fundamentals was written by the people who developed Call Manager. It described the whys and history behind Call Manager, furthering your understanding of the products and creating a framework from which you can organize the vast number of things you can do with Call Manager.

Cisco Voice Gateways and Gatekeepers takes three disparate protocols - MGCP, SIP, H323 - and some difficult concepts - IPIPGWs, dial plans, TCL scripts - and explains them all in the context of VoIP networks. First, it provides the background and then, unlike either Cisco CallManager Fundamentals or Cisco Unity Fundamentals, it goes to the 5 foot level, providing specific configuration and then explanation of that configuration.

I'm not shilling these two other books; they don't cover Cisco Unity in anyway so they aren't its competition in that fashion. I'm not a Top 1000 reviewer who's about to say "buy this book instead!". I'm just a person studying for my CCIE who found myself thinking many times while reading and eventually skimming this book, "this is so bad!"

Again, the authors are in all likelihood nice people. And I do understand Unity a little better for having read the book.

Other Reviews

• Good, was hoping for more
• Not the best Cisco Press book I've read
• Good coverage for the Unity Administrator
• The Underlying Theory Under Unity.