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Book Review: Network Warrior

I just finished up a pretty thorough read of Network Warrior, published by O’Reilly Media, Inc.  I have to say that it was one of the best network engineering books that I have read in quite some time. The book is  packed full of nuggets of knowledge that I have not seen together in one book. Gary A. Donahue, the author, has done a great job of going over material in that CCNA’s need to know, but where it really shines is the discussion of things that the current CCNA folks are not forced to learn… one big example is CatOS. CatOS is still in use in a multitude of  devices out there and its nice to find a book that still acknowledges that.

The book is very Cisco centric (But what network guy isnt), still the topics usually apply to other vendors quite well. I especially loved part 8 of the book, titled “Designing Networks”. He does a GREAT job of walking through the network design process… including selling it to management. I also felt that part 6, “Server Load Balancing” is a must read for anyone with services that need to scale, once again the discussion is Cisco focused.. but there are some gems in there that work no matter what techniques you choose are.

This book is one of the few that should always be near so its there to grab when you need it. I HIGHLY recommend this book to anyone that manages a network.