Sams Teach Yourself Networking in 24 Hours (3rd Edition)

You can't go too far in technology these days without at least a casual understanding of data communications over local and wide-area networks (LANs and WANs). Sams Teach Yourself Networking in 24 Hours will clue you in on the seven-layer Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) networking abstraction and other key facts and concepts having to do with communication among computers. This is the sort of book you sit down and read, perhaps doodling some sketches to the side, rather than use as a guide for experiments performed on a live computer. As such, it's a good starting point as you prepare for a general networking exam, such as Microsoft's Networking Essentials exam.

Some readers may find author Matt Hayden's approach a bit scattershot. He introduces, for example, some of the details of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and IP subnetting before he explains network topologies. He also touches on technologies such as hard-drive storage, which are not at all central to networking. But despite the padding and the sometimes-strange organizational decisions, Hayden has done a fine job of communicating the critical facts and concepts about networking in an implementation-independent way. Though he writes about the relative merits of networks built with NetWare, Windows, Unix, and Linux, he doesn't muddy the water with click-this, choose-that instructions. --David Wall

Topics covered: The essentials of computer networking, explained for people who have never studied the subject before. Design and implementation issues are treated generically, and the author makes high-level comparisons among NetWare, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Unix, and Linux.