Much of Advanced Internet Technologies is actually rather basic internetworking. The more "advanced" technologies covered include audio and video codecs, voice over IP, IPv6, PPP, multimedia protocols, and mobile IP. These aren't treated systematically, however, and the coverage is patchy — the chapter on mobile IP, for example, only covers RFC 2002. Coupled with an odd balance between detail and overview, this makes for an awkward volume. More worryingly, however, Advanced Internet Technologies gets some things plain wrong — it explains, for example, link-state routing as identical to distance-vector routing except for the addition of metrics! There are better books covering this material.

It takes some work to produce a whole book just on DHCP. Kercheval describes BOOTP and DHCP in detail, the latter with a finite state machine and step-by-step sample executions. Also covered are DHCP's interactions with LDAP, DNS, and IPv6. The appendices include the full text of four of the relevant RFCs (some fifty pages). About the only thing not included is a formal proof of DHCP's correctness!

February 1999

External links:

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Related reviews:

- books about networking
- books published by Prentice Hall