TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1: The Protocols

This book was a very welcome update of the 1994 first edition, as it was becoming somewhat outdated. The first edition did of course not cover IPv6 as it was published years before the spec was. Now, it goes into great depth on IPv6 and explains it very well. The book still retains Stevens excellent writing style. It is concise, clear and gets to the point quickly. It is filled with examples using either tcpdump or wireshark screen captures, or good illustrations explaining the header structures. The book is over 1000 pages but not wordy, very impressive. Each chapter explains one protocol or concept, TCP being so complex is spread over multiple chapters. One thing I really appreciate with this book is that every chapter includes a section on attacks that has been employed against the protocols. This information is invaluable if you must implement the protocols yourself and makes sure you won't get hit by the same problems as people were in the past. This book is a must have for anyone who works with TCP/IP on a daily basis and/or develops networking software. Even if you work with protocols that are not IP based this book still contains lots of really good ideas that can be reused.

Che dire?! Una vera "bibbia" del TCP/IP.

One of the best books on TCP/IP.

In great condition recommended book

Having only joined the networking field in the last two years and being a fairly newcomer to the game, I'm finding a lot of resources that are often referenced as being over a decade old. Not that this is a bad thing as networking has been (more or less) the same for as long as I've been alive (2 and a half decades). Because of this, I am a small(er) minority that do not own the original edition of Steven's revered TCP/IP Illustrated. The first edition is becoming increasing rare and those that do turn up have seen lots of love from the older folks. I'm quite glad they've updated this brilliant text to bring it into the 21st century. Modern tools such as Wireshark are shown in screen captures to demonstrate the topics in discussion. Greater detail is made to the security implications of each component in the TCP/IP protocol suite (although not a lot elaborated on the lower layers in the stack such as ARP or IP-related attacks). I'm just starting to uncover the wealth of information this tome holds and will recommend it to colleagues for years to come. I hope that 10 to 15 years from now when more changes have been made in the networking space, they will update this text again. Who knows, we may all be using SDN and won't care about the underlying technologies...But until then, this is the definitive guide for in-depth discussion of the TCP/IP suite of protocols. Buy this now especially if you're looking to expand your knowledge of the higher layer protocols such as TCP and UDP. Three chapters alone are dedicated to TCP operations, congestion control and connection management. An excellent reference and must-have for network engineers and architects.