If you've ever been responsible for a network, you know that sinkingfeeling: your pager has gone off at 2 a.m., the network is broken, and you can't figure out why by using a dial-in connection from home. You drive into the office, dig out your protocol analyzer, and spend the next four hours trying to put things back together before the staff shows up for work. When this happens, you often find yourself looking at the low-level guts of the Internet protocols: you're deciphering individual packets, trying to figure out what is (or isn't) happening. Until now, the only real guide to the protocols has been the Internet RFCs--and they're hardly what you want to be reading late at night when your network is down. There hasn't been a good book on the fundamentals of IP networking aimed at network administrators--until now. Internet Core Protocols: The Definitive Guide contains all the information you need for low-level network debugging. It provides thorough coverage of the fundamental protocols in the TCP/IP suite: IP, TCP, UDP, ICMP, ARP (in its many variations), and IGMP. (The companion volume, Internet Application Protocols: The Definitive Guide, provides detailed information about the commonly used application protocols, including HTTP, FTP, DNS, POP3, and many others). It includes many packet captures, showing you what to look for and how to interpret all the fields. It has been brought up to date with the latest developments in real-world IP networking. The CD-ROM included with the book contains Shomiti's "Surveyor Lite," a packet analyzer that runs on Win32 systems, plus the original RFCs, should you need them for reference. Together, this package includes everything you need to troubleshoot your network--except coffee.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 20 Ratings

good book but too much repeated stuff - 2002-05-08
Reviewer Rating:
Very good presentation and description of core protocols (ip, icmp, igmp udp/tcp, arp) and at the right in-depth level I believe (if you want to get more in-depth, the rfc are there for that).
Anyway the book could be made much better just removing stuff since it contains way too much duplicated info. First there are whole paragraphs repeated exactly the same just a few pages away. I think this can get quite offensive (do you think I'm so dumb that I don't remember?).
And then there are the screenshots which are not very appropriate here since this is not an application review. A well formatted packet decode a'la tcpdump/snoop would be much better since screenshots display lots of useless stuff (menus, toolbars, etc) and for big packets a single screenshot can't fit the whole thing so you have to include two or more of them introducing discontinuities.
Furthermore screenshots are uselessly duplicated throughout the book. For example a simple ip header contains jsut 12 fields so a single screenshot can fit them all, anyway to describe these fields, the same screenshot is duplicated 14 times, from page 59 to page 77, and then a few more times. This happens for all the protocols and each screenshot takes about 66% of a page, so this is a real waste of paper! Often it gets really ridiculous when you have the same screenshot on 2 facing pages so you don't even have to slightly rotate your eyes to find them ;-)

Well done - 2004-01-27
Reviewer Rating:
The best thing about this book, which covers protocols like TCP and IP in detail, is that the discussion is from the ground-up, not from the top-down. I know what TCP/IP does for me at an application level, but I didn't know how TCP, or IP, or any of the other covered protocols, worked under the covers. Now I feel like I have a much better understanding of the details, which means I have a better understanding of a lot of things that are built on top of these protocols, as well as of system administration type tasks. Even the page after page of 'this bit field does this' text, which in most books would be rarely visited reference material, is decent, because individual reference sections contain real-world 'this means that' information. I would have liked a bit more discussion of Internet naming, IP address details, and so on, but I can find that information elsewhere.

Best book on the topic - 2006-04-03
Reviewer Rating:
From beginning to end I found this to be the most substantive book on the topic(s). The book doesn't "hold your hand" but it takes you from the essentials right through more advanced concepts. Well done.

An exemplary discussion of network and transport protocols - 2007-08-31
Reviewer Rating:
If you need to strengthen your knowledge of network-layer and transport-layer protocols (IP, ICMP, TCP and UDP), go no further than this book. Recommended. This is a critical reference. It's more readable than Comer or Stevens (and easily as complete) for learning about the network-layer and transport-layer protocols. For my money, this is the single most important book to have in this area. A sterling, untoppable effort from the O'Reilly label, and an absolute must for anyone learning about low-level internetworking.

Learning may be hard; explaining is harder - 2007-08-14
Reviewer Rating:
The better you know a subject matter, the better you can explain it to others...

Well, this is only 50% of what's required: the other 50% is being good at explaining.

And that's the problem with this book: everything is terribly (badly) explained!

I'm in no position to discuss the author's prowess when it comes to mastering Networking, but filling a book with "reference manual" type of data (something you can find in many others books -and websites, for that matter!) doesn't prove it, either. At all.

As other reviews exposed, repetitions, copy-paste style, are common in this book; also common is the definition that its writing style brings to mind: gibberish.

Let's say it out loud: writing a book is no mean feat, and every book on any matter _has_ its share of shortcomings, be it important or just anecdotical. But, honestly, I haven't found much to salvage from this reading.

Reviewer and author Richard Bejtlich mentions this book in his review of "The TCP/IP Guide: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Internet Protocols Reference" by Charles Kozierok, as belonging to an intermediate-level class of recommended books; and he mentions, too, Kevin Burns' "TCP/IP Analysis and Troubleshooting Toolkit" as belonging to the expert-level class.

Well, I've found Kevin Burns' book faaaaaaaar more instructive, readable, etc, than this other; they're as opposite as night and day (well, let's be a bit less harsh: as dusk and dawn) (an enlightening dawn and an obscure dusk, that is).

Buy that one, forget this one.

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