And yet another history book. 
“Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet” by Katie Hafner is a great book about the early history of the internet.
You’ll learn how things started and why some things are the way they are.
ISBN-13: 978-0684832678
Yes there was a time before the Internet. And people were able to communicate. In his book “The Victorian Internet” Tom Standage describes the history of the Internet before the Internet: The telegraph network. I realy enjoyed reading this book (ISBN-13: 978-0802716040).
I recently wrote that I bougth a Kindle. O’Reilly (US) has a great offer:Register your printed copy of a book and get the electronic version for $5. You can choose between different formats including PDF and MOBI which work well on the Kindle.
Quite some time I bought a kindle and must say that I’m quite happy with it. I think it’s much more comfortable to hold a Kindle with 250g than a 1000page novel with about 1kg. And it’s great to cary a whole IKEA Billy worth of books in your back pack.
Some drawbacks though: Books you buy directly @amazon are infected with DRM, (complex) PDFs will lead to some problems and there are some books which are not very well made. For example the Routing TCP/IP books from CiscoPress. You can only read page by page and cannot skip to the next chapter.
And one more drawback: I spend quite some money on buying books (It’s easy, just buy it and a couple of minutes later you have it on your Kindle) and a lot of time reading.
Don’t get me wrong: I still like books printed on dead trees. An seriously: 1 Kindle on your bookshelf doesn’t look impressive, a couple of hundred (or thousand) books on paper do.
The subtitle
Everything you need to know that wasn’t on the CCNA exam
is absolutely correct. This book is a must read if you’re fresh in the businesses and have some basic Cisco know-how (like the CCNA). Unlike most (all?) Certifiation Books this book has many real live examples and covers quite a few advanced topics like Catalyst 6500 (VSS), QoS or the Nexus series.
Even I learned a thing or two while reading this book. And in case it doesn’t help you junior Cisco admins to do there job better: The book is heavy enough to hit them with.
See the book content at O’Reilly.
As you might know I’m quite interested in IPv6. Recently a new book about IPv6 security was published by Cisco Press.
The book covers IPv6 protocols vulnerabilities, perimeter security (firewalls), securing network devices and (routing) protocols, host security, IPSec and mobile IPv6 security. The network part concentrates on Cisco’s IOS and PixOS, but this book also overs host security using Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and Windows as example systems. Also some tools to attack your IPv6 infrastructure are presented. You might even learn a thing or two about securing IPv4 networks as many (Cisco) features exists for both protocols.
The only drawback for me is that the term hacker is once again associated with the evil attacker who wants to steal your data.
Book Details:
There are several books on IPv6. Two of my favorites are
Deploying IPv6 Networks (amazon.de)
and
IPv6 in Practice: A Unixer’s Guide to the Next Generation Internet (amazon.de)
Deploying IPv6 Networks covers IPv6 basics and IPv6 networking (routing, mutlicast, QoS, …) using Cisco devices. IPv6 in Practice: A Unixer’s Guide to the Next Generation Internet covers the *NIX side including Debian GNU/Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD.
