Routing in the Internet [Englisch] [Lehrbuch]

Usually it's more then enough for day to day operations and many people are completely satisfied. But some people want to learn a bit about other 20% and see piture in motion. This book is exactly for them. Probably it doesn't help you much in Cisco router configuration, but you can learn internet history and future from the routing point of view. You can learn a way how routing protocols are developing, what are the current problems and what to expect in a recent future.

This book was included in the CCIE library set and many people were really disappointed because it isn't focused on Cisco routing and switching. In opposite, the most part of this book covers everything that is usually not included in Cisco books. From CCIE or Cisco prospective this book is not really interesting, but it has another goal.

A few more words about this book. It was written by French guy, and he is not Cisco employee. His style is completly different from e.g. Cisco press books'. Cisco wants to show you how well and smoothly it has solved problems, and this book wants to show you what are the problems and drawbacks of current solutions. Cisco gives you answers and this book sometimes just states questions without answers. It's more academic review then manual. Keep it in mind if you are going to buy it.

The final words. Sometimes the language is dull and too dry but if you want to know current state of the internet evolution this book gives you information which is hard to find in any other single book. This book is very good but it's goal is different. It's like the most part of passengers have questions about tickets and they ask ticket agency. But some of them might want to learn more about airplane itself. They can find very good book about airplanes. It's also interesting book but it's definitly different and optional reading for the traveler. The same about this one. It's optional and not the highest priority book but it really gives you a lot of new information about internet routing.

Then Perlman's 2nd edition was released. What _Interconnections_ had lacked before in practical details is more than addressed in that amazing book. One might hope that Huitema's 2nd edition would catch up to Perlman's in theoretical detail, making both books equivalent references for the field of Internet routing.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. Huitema's second book reads much like the first. The "2nd Edition" enhancements seem to center on coverage of "new technologies" such as label switching and quality of service. None of the background that _Routing on the Internet_ lacked in the first edition is made up for here, and I found some of the coverage of new technologies to be superficial or poorly presented.

Moreover, the presentation of the material is simply bad. The book is poorly edited, with grammatical errors throughout the text and fairly unclear writing. Worse, the diagramming style is extremely inconsistant. Throughout much of the book, the diagrams used appear to simply be typeset ASCII pictures!

There are also points in the book where it appears that dated, inappropriate text from the first book was literally pasted into the second book. For instance, at one point the author asserts that "not many companies are making money off of Internet routing devices" (paraphrase), and "a company called cisco" (which he continues to lowercase) is a vendor of the most popular routers. Since he laters makes mention of Ipsilon, I'm guessing he hasn't just been asleep as Internet routing companies rampaged across the NASDAQ.

Huitema is at his best when giving his opinions about aspects of Internet technologies. His recommendations are usually spot-on, and the historical background he provides about protocol development rivals the similar, excellent content in Perlman's _Interconnections_.

However, with _Interconnections 2_ on the shelves, I can't see a good reason to shell out ... for this book. Huitema covers some technologies that Perlman doesn't, but Perlman covers essential technologies (such as switching and multicast forwarding) far better than _Routing on the Internet_.

It gives a very thorough cover of routing at the level of a good study book, which is lacking from the popular TCP/IP books.

This book was written some years ago, and it's age shows, e.g. in it's cover of BGP4 and IPv6.

I recommend this book wholeheartly, with the warning that people who need to actually work with specific routing protocol(s) nowadays should buy a current book.