Book Review: Network Warrior

Network Warrior, by Gary A. Donahue

This book bills itself as “everything you need to know what wasn’t on the CCNA exam.”

I never took the CCNA exam (though I plan on it soon). In fact, when I ordered this book, I really didn’t know very much about networking at all. I was of course familiar with the basic concepts from the sysadmin side – IP addresses, broadcast domains, gateways, DNS, stateful and stateless protocols, ARP and all that jazz – but I really didn’t understand much about how it worked from the side of the network infrastructure. I was pretty ignorant to STP, routing protocols, the IOS CLI, and other facets of a network engineer’s day-to-day job. I picked it up because I was in the middle of designing a development environment based on ESX and iSCSI and it helps to optimize network storage protocols if you actually understand the network in addition to the storage protocol. So, a few days later, here I was.

Contrary to what the tagline might imply, this book does not make any assumptions about your Cisco knowledge. Not only do you not need to be a CCNA, you really don’t need much knowledge at all of CatOS or IOS (both are covered) in order to absorb most of the book. (I did find myself flipping to the glossary from time to time to look up a term that hadn’t been introduced yet. Every term I wanted to look up was in the glossary.) The book makes few assumptions, and tends to stick with theory more than commands. The CatOS bits are a nice touch, though.

Instead, what’s delivered is a concise, easy read that’s probably of more use to people just looking into a career of network administration than those who are already entrenched in it. This isn’t to say it’s a niche book, or a book geared towards sysadmins, or that it’s not useful for a moderately experienced network administrator. Rather, the material is incredibly accessible to anyone of a moderate technical inclination. Donahue is extremely knowledgeable and his tone is technical and understandable, but not overwhelming, throughout the entire book.

The book focuses on breadth rather than depth; if you’re planning on studying for a CCNA, I recommend picking this up along with a good CCNA study guide (I used McGraw-Hill’s) and the CCNA Portable Command Guide. But what is covered in the book’s breadth both is useful and makes an impression: his section on dealing with management in a crisis is every bit as useful as the bits on QoS and VoIP or his subnetting tips.

While the book is somewhat weak on routing, paying only lip service to protocols other than EIGRP and OSPF, it can be easily supplemented with a book that’s more detail-oriented. This book prompted me to pick up Halabi’s second edition Internet Routing Architectures. I think my CCNA practice book covered the basics of other routing protocols pretty well.

If Limoncelli’s “The Practice of System and Network Administration” is the canonical tome on what it means to be a sysadmin, this ought to be the canonical tome on administering Cisco networks.

Rating: 5/5