One of the largest growth areas in home computing has been in the area of networking. Once the domain of big businesses with lots of money and highly trained IT staff, networks have now entered the mainstream.

Whilst networking has becoming much simpler and cheaper to implement, for many, it is still a black art involving the sacrifice of virgins and arcane chanting as well as a passing familiarity with protocols, routers and other mysterious things.

Home Networking - The Missing Manual aims to demystify the whole process by providing a step by step guide to implementing both wired and wireless networks at home. Unlike many books on the subject, it includes a fair bit of information on Apple Macs as well as Windows PCs. With the success of the various iMacs, this makes sense.

Product	Home Networking – The Missing Manual
From	www.missingmanual.com
	Both Mac & PC covered, fair coverage of a large subject
	Not enough on troubleshooting

The first two major sections cover wired and then wireless networking. These are well written and discuss what you need to know without getting too bogged down in the deeper technicalities. Windows XP is used heavily in the examples but earlier versions also get commented upon where they differ significantly. Wisely, the authors have decided to stick to workgroup based networks and apart from a half page explanation of what a domain is, the book steers clear of them.

As there is a lot of common ground between wired and wireless networking, we would expect some commonality in the discussions of each. What we didn't expect was such a blatant cut and paste job with entire paragraphs and sections being repeated verbatim in both sections.

The wireless section stresses the importance of security and includes a lot of useful information on making sure no-one can break in to your network.

The entire section on Powerline networking is redundant for UK readers although some mains based networking kit can be found if you look hard enough.

The middle section concentrates on sharing data and printers. It describes the various XP security models and shows how you can protect your data in different ways. It also describes how to create user accounts and covers mixing of Windows PCs and Macs on the same network.

The last sections cover less obvious things you can do with a network such as streaming your MP3 files, playing multiplayer games, viewing photos and adding additional storage. These sections are useful although the section on storage concentrates too heavily on a particular Linksys device.

The book finishes off with a look at accessing your home network externally and shows how you can dial in from a laptop or gain access via the GoToMyPC software. Macs are also catered for with ssh. We did feel this section could have been much better as there are many other options that went unmentioned. That said, remote access is a big field and you could easily fill a book with that subject alone.

One thing we didn't like was the lack of diagnostic hints and tips. The book is very prescriptive and assumes everything works first time. Anyone that has used a PC or messed about with networks knows they rarely do what you want every time and many readers may end up frustrated at the lack of help when things went wrong.

On the plus side, there were a few useful summaries such as the default addresses and username/passwords for a range of router manufacturers.

Overall we felt this book to be adequate. At 237 pages it covers a fair bit of ground and the explanations are reasonably clear. However, with another 70 pages or so to add troubleshooting and expand on some of the options, it would have been much better.