TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1: The Protocols (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)

If you're into learning the underlying concepts of some of the most used protocols (ip, icmp, udp, and all those encapsulated in the aforementioned ones), there's no way around it! I've bought this book as soon as a friend of mine told me the following, which I'll quote "If you want to become a ninja in TCP/IP, you'll likely need to have this book at hand."; I found the book quite annoying in the beginning, due to the simple fact that I had recently read the book "O'reilly: TCP/IP Network Administration". I've dropped reading this one for like 2 months, and when I've started reading it back, It all went so utterly better. The book covers a lot of protocols, one of which I found very useful was DNS, because the available RFC's were generally not-so-easy(tm) to follow and understand; and after reading the chapter on DNS, It all turned to be much more simple than I found it be when reading the relevant RFC's. The book is a definitive guide for anyone, and should be used as such, for coverage and implementation you should read the book entitled "UNIX Network Programming" by the same author, Mr. W. Stevens (which unfortunately has passed away)

Highlights:

*) Very clear and precise
*) source code in book very nicely explained.

Drawbacks:

*) Sometimes very heavy treatment (at least on my poor brain!)
*) Not a very portable reference (considering there are 2 more volumes). Is there a CD version ;-) ??

I initially bought this book to understand how the tcp/ip stack was implemented in linux.
Being a programmer mainly doing business related software, I initially found understanding this a little daunting to go through . After a little effort and looking at the source, i found this book enlightening!

I found it extremely useful comparing code and concepts in the book with the actual tcp/ip source (FreeBSD and Linux). I am still going through 3 volumes of the book.

A very good text book if you want to dig into the core of tcp/ip.

TCP/IP is the most fundamental protocol that drives the whole of the internet. A deep understanding of them is necessary for any wannabe network administrator/programmer/analyst etc.

Richard Stevens TCP/IP illustrated is one of the best books you can ever buy to understand not only TCP/IP but also other fundamental protocols like ARP, DHCP, SMTP etc. The word 'Illustrated' is significant, you actually see the protocols in action throughout this book. There are more pages devoted to examples rather than concepts, which is actually an excellent way to relate to the concepts.

Richard Stevens doesnt just write something, and assume you understood him and believed him in blind faith. He actually shows you what you write and helps you become more analytical in the workings of the internet.

This book is a bit old though, and with Richard Stevens dead, we might not see a revival of this book. It only covers TCP modification till Tahoe and Reno but chapter 24 gives you a more or less good idea about what the future will be like (in which we actually are, by the timeline of this book.)

Overall, if you want to not only learn networks, but feel them, then buy this book.

When I purchased this book, I was concerned that it was outdated. As I quickly learned, great books are never outdated and this is one of them. I was a beginner in my level of knowledge of TCP/IP before I read Stevens' book. After, I would call myself an intermediate, only because of my lack of enough tangible experience. Reading this book and using the information to analyze traffic dumps gave me a level of confidence in working with TCP/IP that I did not possess before.

This book is the most definitive book on the networking and
TCP/IP protocal suite. If you wanna know the internal workings
of TCP/IP and the Internet, this book is for you. This teaches
the basic TCP/IP fundamentals first such as Ethernet,ARP,RARP and
IP, and later more complicated and high layer components: TCP
and UDP and application layer protocols. I think that it's a
good way to grasp network concepts that you start with practical
books like this rather than with theoretical books such as
Computer Networks by Tanenbaum,..and other university text books.