Computing Internet Books

This is by far the best ISA Server book on the market.
Worth every penny I paid for it.

This is THE book if you are looking to learn ISA 2004. It is structured in an easy-to-understand manner for windows admins who are familiar with Windows but may not have been exposed to ISA Server or are upgrading from ISA 2000. All in all this is the only book on the subject you'll need.

I found this book to be extremely helpful in understanding ISA architecture and how it might fit into our organization.

The book is well laid out, concise and readable. The first section lays out a high level view of ISA functions and provides a clear overview of how to assess which components are appropriate for solving specific network security issues. The section on deployment goes into more detail, explaining how to install and configure the various components of an ISA deployment. Part III on securing servers and services goes into the specific details of configuring ISA to protect messaging, web and RPC traffic.

Microsoft networking products continue to improve both in functionality and ease of use. Having guides like this make understanding and implementing new technology viable even for small organizations with limited budgets.

The book is poorly named. "Unleashed" suggests to me wild and wonderful things to do with complex features or even tricks and undocumented things. This is definitely a black Labrador on-the-leash kind of book, and it will get an administrator safely across the broad avenue that is an ISA installation. It's a great book in spite of the name.

I used "Unleashed" as a guide for installation of ISA Server 2004 (replacing ISA Server 2000) on the perimeter of a small office network that has ten servers on three different domains (including a web server and a mail server) and twenty workstations. I studied this book and Shinder's "Configuring ISA Server 2004" extensively before beginning the installation, and I had previous experience doing the installation and maintenance of the ISA 2000 installation that ISA 2004 replaced.

I preferred this book ("Unleashed") to the Shinder book as an installation guide, but I like Shinder as a reference because of its greater depth (twice as many pages). Both books promote ISA, but the Shinder books examines (in a defensive but very useful way) competing options to ISA more thoroughly. Shinder's book then would be more useful for those evaluating ISA versus competing products.

I also have the Microsoft MCSA/MCSE Training Kit. This book is the only ISA 2004 book that includes a 120-day trial version of ISA Server 2004. I have spent only two hours with this book but found the questions and answers at the end of each lesson helpful reflecting on key points. I did find a glaring error early on. It is not true that "the IP address assigned to the external interface [of the ISA server] must be routable ON [emphasis added] the Internet." The truth is that this IP address must be routable TO the Internet; and a private address (10.1.1.1 for example) will do just fine if there is (as in my case) a router with a public address between ISA and the Internet. Microsoft books are of coure authoratative and prep well for the exams in spite of an occasional error.

Our ISA server is connected on the Internet side with a private (nonroutable) IP address to an $89 Linksys router, which is configured with simple firewall filters. The Linksys router has a public IP address and connects to a Verizon DSL modem. A laptop in the DMZ between ISA and the router is used for testing ISA protection. The ISA server of course could be connected directly to the DSL modem; but we like the presence of the additional appliance (the Linksys router) as an additional level of defense. We run GFI (number one Exchange spam filter) on our Exchange server since ISA and most other firewall products only do token spam filtering.

"Unleashed" provided sufficiently detailed and accurate guidance for each step that I took: hardening the OS, installing ISA, configuring the networks attached to the ISA NICs, setting up firewall rules, publishing an IIS web server, publishing an Exchange mail server, and setting up Outlook web access. The total time required was only two hours even with a couple of errors.

ISA is a complex product with routing, caching proxy and reverse proxy servers, firewall (including stateful and advance application level inspection), VPN server, and simple spam filter. Michael Noel in "Unleashed" clearly shows how to use the greatly improved ISA administrative interface with its templates and wizards to configure my simple architecture and also more complex architectures that place servers in the DMZ as well as the limited single-homed topology with the ISA server in the DMZ. My company is not using VPN, but the book provides thorough coverage of VPN, which many be mission-critical to those with branch offices and road warriors.

Lastly, if you are new to ISA, be aware that ISA 2006 was released as a beta earlier this year. Many reviews suggest that ISA 2006 is not a major change. Microsoft says that upgrading from 2004 to 2006 will be supported. Amazon shows no titles as yet for ISA 2006. My guess is that the final release of 2006 will not come before the end of the year.

The book states that it's goal is to provide a user (or admin) view of TCP/IP in Win2k8 Server and Vista. It doesn't do a good job. Routing and NAT are hardly covered.

Examples:
* Do you want to know what `netsh routing ip autodhcp` does? Or maybe what `show rtmdestinations` does? You won't find out in this book.
* The discussion on SWS (silly window sindrome) is pretty confusing. Wikipedia does a better job at explaining it.

The law is the law, and you are far better off knowing the laws as it applies to IT about copyright, trademarks, domain names, software patents, trade secrets, NDA's, NCA's, open source licenses, consulting agreements, SLA's, beta test agreements, EULA's, SaaS TOS, commercial distribution agreements, privacy, digital content agreements, videogame publishing agreements, foreign distribution agreements, and what happens if you try to sell your encryption software to a Denied Person.

Oh my aching head!

Fortunately, Gene Landy has summarized all the above and more into language understandable by people not attorney's, added 38 juicy contracts and forms and authored a book you need, now: "The IT / Digital Legal Companion: A Comprehensive Business Guide to Software, IT, Internet, Media and IP Law".

I've been reading up on Software as a Service, chapter 13, and in 24 pages Gene did an excellent job of summarizing what you need to know about SaaS from a legal point of view. This book, published in June, is very up to date, logically organized and includes the seasoned judgment of a practicing IT attorney.

If you are in the IT industry, you have no excuse for not owning this book.

This legal overview is absolutely what every sw marketer needs: if (s)he is new, it's a great initiation, and for a more war-worn guy like me (20+ years...) it's a great recapitulation of all you thought you knew, but had forgot, plus all the stuff you just never knew. One can use it as a reference, as a do-it-yourself, or as a backgrounder to prepare for working with a lawyer. The latter is the most probable scenario, but the book will save you tons of money for your lawyer's not having to spend time educating you and your team first.

Great Book! I think this book was written not for the beginner but for a more experienced computer user. Some things are simple to understand but others are very detailed. Still, this book can be a big help to anyone that has XP for their running system.

Good book, but not everything is included. There is absolutley nothing on EFS (File Encrytion) which is fairly important. Four stars that could of been Five!

If you are looking for a book that is not geared to simply passing a test, this is the book for you. It really covers the technology in depth and detail.

Having recently upgraded our home computers from Win98 SE to XP SP2, numerous issues emerged viz. hardware and software. This book proved invaluable, especially in getting our multimedia and network functionality back up. For those holding off upgrading, XP is getting harder to find, and you don't want to get stuck having to upgrade to Vista ...

The book I ordered was advertised as being slightly damaged. I have not found the damage yet.

After having read volumes I & II, I felt compelled to read volume III in spite of other customer reviews here. Having just finished this one, I'm inclined to agree with the other reviewers - interesting, but not as earth-shattering as the first two. The first half of the book covers, in volume-II style detail, an implementation of T/TCP for BSD; although this is interesting, it's not very practical, since T/TCP never caught on in the real world. The next part of the book covers HTTP & NNTP, but doesn't go into much detail; if you know what HTTP & NTTP are, you probably already know all the material covered in this book. Finally, the book ends by examining the BSD implementation of the Unix domain sockets. This last bit was the most relevant part of the book, but don't even think about trying to read this if you haven't completed volume II (and have it handy - the text refers back to specific pages and diagrams from Volume II). If you've read the other two books (Volume II in particular), you'll want to read this one to round out the experience, but don't expect to be blown away like you were with the others.

This book covers a need distinct from the first two volumes - the first two covered the core protocols' internals, while this one covers the application level protocols - a subject hardly covered by any other book.

I've found this book very useful for understanding T/TCP, a subject my teacher did not explain well and was obscure for me.

The NNTP & HTTP cover was useful, especially as I was doing a lab on HTTP, but I must admit that as far as HTTP goes the RFCs were sufficient.

Like the other two volumes, this book is the definite bible if you are interested in HTTP, T/TCP and UDP. As time passes, these protocols will be used more widely and one will see more people interseted in the book. Similar protocols just start to emerge in areas such as wireless....

Volume 1 covered the basic - down to the nitty, gritty bits. Volume 2 gave us the source. Volume 3 tells us about T/TCP and HTML. Not more, not less... I devoured the first two volumes - and just browsed the third.

If you are planning on writing any software for the web, this is one of the books you need. This book covers T/TCP, HTTP, NNTP, and more including UD Protocols and some good info in the appendix.

W. Richard Stevens has never let me down with any of his books, and this one is no diffrent. Its too bad hes not around to write books any more, alot of people will be missing out on great books from a great author.

This is a must have!!

If you are looking for details about MFC this is NOT the book to buy. If you are looking for some "tricks" well then maybe this will work for you. The book is well enough written but lacks some detail about how the code works. But I am not an expert on MFC. If I could I would add 1/2 star to the 3 I gave.

Worth every penny and more!

I bought this around 1999, long after I started programming in MFC. The one regret I had was not buying this book sooner. Just the format alone of this book is priceless. The question-answer format makes it very easy to find things and makes a great quick reference with good examples. I am writing this review almost 6 years later because this book still helped me out a lot even after years of writing MFC stuff. The great thing about the book is it covers a lot of MFC material and hits on things you may not use day to day.

If you are a beginning MFC programmer or even intermediate, this is the book for you.

This book is not all-inclusive, you should get Jeff Prosise's "Programming Windows with MFC" if you are looking for that. Instead, Kain's book is really the answers to the most frequent, irritating, and time-wasting little problems one finds while programming in MFC. This book should not really be necessary, except that MFC is so badly designed that little things that should be easy to do often end being a great waste of time, while the programmers search for the clumsy and roundabout way out. Should be in every MFC programmer's bookshelf.

This book is written in a question and answer format, just like a FAQ. Although the content predominantly revolves around documents and views, many other common questions are also answered.

Personally, I love the format and the content. I hate having to weed through several huge books to find an answer to a simple question. I loaned out my previous copy, and it wasn't returned. I ended up buying another copy.

While this book won't make you a guru, it just might save you an hour of frustration. Since I migrate between operating systems, APIs, and SDKs, I never put in the time to earn the title of MFC Guru, so this book comes in handy, especially when it comes to refreshing my memory, without having to plow through the MFC code.

Unfortunately, this book is not all-inclusive, as many questions are left out. The "new" controls are left out entirely. However, even with the omissions, the book will give you a straight answer or point you in the right direction about 90% of the time.

Highly recommended.

This book gives an organized but purely descriptive overview of server load balancing and should be helpful to anyone who is approaching the subject for the first time but does not require quantitative assessments of the different methods for doing server load balancing. It is written for the network administrator, but anyone, including network managers should find it helpful. Network engineers may find the treatment too qualitative, but it could be supplemented by more rigorous material if needed.

Chapter 1 is a brief overview of the history of load balancing and why it is needed in Internet environments. DNS-based, firewall, and global server load balancing are briefly discussed, along with clustering. This is followed in chapter 2 by a brief review of the OSI model and the different components involved in server load balancing. The author cautions that the use of VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol) may cause problems if the load balancers become isolated from each other, but does not give any historical or test examples of this. The same holds true for his caution on the use of fail-over cables.

The discussion becomes a little more detailed in chapter 3, wherein the author discusses the actual functioning of a server load balancer. Direct server return is discussed, with its use of MAC address translation and loopback interfaces. Both server-based and switch-based load balancers are briefly discussed, but the author does not want to commit to which is the better architecture. The inclusion of some benchmarking studies would be helpful here.

Performance metrics, such as connections per second, total concurrent connections, and throughput are discussed in chapter 4. Although the discussion is purely descriptive, the author does give a "metrics matrix" that outlines what metrics are important for different types of traffic.

The author gets down to describing the network infrastructure needed to do server load balancing in chapter 5. The different possibilities for network infrastructure are classified according to the IP configuration (flat-based or NAT-based), the return path (bridge path, route path, or DSR), and physical connectivity (one-armed or two-armed). The advantages of the different types of SLB architectures are discussed briefly, but no real test cases or benchmarking studies are included.

The details of flat-based SLB network architectures are discussed in chapter 6. The simplicity of this architecture is emphasized, along with its ability to pass FTP and stream traffic more readily (no real examples given however).

I did not read the rest of the book which covers administrative matters, and so its review will be omitted.

But after digging into the content I was forced to re-evaluate my first impression. I looked to this book to guide me through numerous pieces and choices of server load balancing on a fair but balanced agenda. What I found was far too much information that was simply digested and reformatted from vendor and free areas.

I look to an expert on a topic to give new insight and twists to anything they write. The lack of any personal commitment or recommendation was surprising. Which made the book more into a mid-level technical guide with no path or strategy summary as I would expect. A good beginner type book for the basic information. It was well organized and had decent flow. Chapter 5 seemed to offer the most promise, but never quite concluded with anything concrete.

this is the first O'reilly book that I've been disapointed with! Too many purposeless examples and some configs can be downloaded from vendors web site...am also wondering about the many PETA references for a load balancing book (just off topic)

This publication is good for an quick introductory view of server load balancers. Users of load balancing products from certain manufacturers will benefit from the configuration options discussed in the final section of the book. For a more in-depth discussion, I would recommend Kopparapu's text "Load Balancing Servers, Firewalls, and Caches".

I expected a lot more from this book that while admittedly was the first that covered the topic, but did not really explain things in detail. Half of the book is on configurations that you can download from vendor web sites and the real design issues are never really addressed. The author runs a web site on teh topic and also is a known expert so this made the book more dissappointing.
The first O'Reilly book I have ever regretted buying.