Network Warrior: Everything you need to know that wasn't on the CCNA exam by Gary A. Donahue Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Network Warrior: Everything you need to know that wasn't on the CCNA exam
Book Review: First Ever Review for Amazon
Summary: 5 Stars
Great book. Highly recommended for anyone who needs intermediate network skills. Go beyond your entry level cert. I got this and the linux network cookbook plus some Red Hat specific material to prepare for the RHCE- should keep me busy for awhile.Book Review: Good Book
Summary: 5 Stars
This epically-titled O'Reilly book is a well-organized collection of network configuration tips, stories, and common "gotchas", as told by a self-admitted grouchy old network admin to younger, wet-behind-the-ears network administrators.
The author, in a move uncommon to most networking manuals, just cuts to the chase and says what needs to be said. Everything is told from a Cisco perspective, with Cisco terminology, and the only hint of variation allowed for is the occasional explanation when something is radically (or subtly, in some way that would ruin everything when you least expect it) different between CatOS and IOS. This is undeniably a good thing; it keeps the book short, and realistically, Cisco is one
of the forefront leaders in the enterprise network market.
A wide range of topics are talked about - possible problems that you could run into with auto-negotiation on your fast-ethernet network, how to configure spanning tree or etherchannel, getting QoS to work properly, and a whole host of topics one should know when creating one's own medium-to-large sized network. Even for those that already know how to implement these features, the author explains exactly when someone would want to use these features and how they evolved, and how they ought to be properly used.
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in enterprise
networking - ranging from the relatively professionally uninitiated like myself (I only do networking administration for Computer Science House at the Rochester Institute of Technology) to those who are just transitioning from networking classes to actual jobs, who will benefit perhaps the most from the book's tips and tricks from a person in industry, or even the average middle-aged network administrator, who may find a large portion of the book a snooze, but likely still pick up a trick or two that was previously unknown.
Book Review: Good stuff....
Summary: 5 Stars
I've had my CCNA for about 2 yrs now and am coming up on renewal time. I'm actually working on my CCNP which will also satisfy that needed renewal.
What I like about this book is that it goes into other details that the CCNA study guides don't. So the title(well, subtitle) does exactly what it states!
Great book! And this was actually a book I enjoyed reading on my leisure time just to get a better grasp of concepts and things I hadn't even thought about.
It has also cleared up a couple of things while on the job! Like i said, Good stuff..... :-)
Reviewers that have claimed that the title was deceptive in some way are being unfair IMO. I'm not sure how anyone could be mislead that this might be Cisco-centric with the title "Network Warrior: Everything you need to know that wasn't on the CCNA"(?). Plus the mention of EIGRP, CatOS vs. IOS, a snippet in the Preface that states "Cisco equipment is used for the examples within this book, ...." also leads one to believe that this will mostly, if not entirely, Cisco specific.
Book Review: Great Cisco networking book. Every sys admin should have it.
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a great book on Cisco networking, so just buy it now. I've tried reading the CCNA prep books before but never got around to finishing them because they got into too much detail and I wasn't working with Cisco products enough to get hands-on experience.
At my current job I'm more involved in networking, so when I saw this book, I thought I'd give it a shot. So far it's been very helpful. This book is strictly practical in nature, so you won't get a lot of detail on Ethernet framing or the OSI model. (Note to author, it would be helpful in the second edition to include one concise chapter on the OSI model and network protocols as a refresher.)
If you have a certification such as MCSA, MCSE, Network+, or CCNA, you will have all the background info you need before reading this book. If you have no networking knowledge at all, this book is not for you.
I've been skipping around reading different chapters (this is the kind of book where you can do that). This is one of the few IT book that I've read that actually gave me practical info that I could put to use right away. Here are two examples:
1.) From Ch 2 regarding auto-negotiation: In June 2008 we moved to a new office that had all new gigabit Cisco switches that replaced our 10/100 switches. A few weeks after our move we started getting reports of errors when saving files to our EMC Celerra NAS. Users would get errors saving files to the NAS and their computers' system logs would report a "Delayed Write Failed" error.
Source: MRxSmb
EventID:50
{Delayed Write Failed} Windows was unable to save all the data for the file \Device\LanmanRedirector
The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere.
This looked to be a network issue so when I was poking around the Celerra Manager I noticed that its NICs were hard coded to 100 full duplex. Since we were on gigabit switches that were set to auto-negotiate, I deduced (from the knowledge gained in this chapter) that the EMC devices should be set to auto-negotiate as well. So after contacting EMC and then changing the EMC NICs to auto-negotiate, we've had no more reports of these errors.
2.) From Ch 9 regarding routing: I ran into an issue with improper configuration of the gateway of last resort during our office move. For whatever reason, the gateway of last resort was not configured on our new VLANs. We noticed the problem because we couldn't get to the Internet, but we could get to our other offices. When our network support vendor walked my manager through running the sho ip route command, I immediately saw "gateway of last resort is not set" at the top and knew that it was the issue. So even though I had only been reading this book for two weeks, it paid off. I'm sure the vendor would have found the issue after a few more minutes, but it was nice to be able to point out the issue to them.
Book Review: Great book for its target audience
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is exactly what it set out to be, "Everything You Need to Know That Wasn't on the CCNA Exam". This book is targeted at junior network engineers and provides for them a strong foundation of skills to build upon. It assumes a little bit of networking knowledge, but not much. This book is also great for server admins that have recently switched roles to the networking side of things or want to know a little bit more.
Pros: This book is easier to read then other technical books that I have read. Gary seems to put a bit of realism into the technical topics citing problems that he has dealt with in his years of experience. This book covers many topics and gets to what you need to know quickly.
Cons: One of the pros means that there is also a con. This is NOT a book that will go into great detail on the inner workings of protocols like TCP/BGP. It does brush up on these topics, but entire books have been written on these individual protocols, or high availability technologies, etc.
Conclusion: This book is what it is advertised to be. It is a great book to form a foundation of networking skills, but it should be followed up with other books that dive deep into detail into a particular topic that is required for your job. I recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn more about networking as a whole, especially junior network engineers or recent college grads.