If any area of computing could be referred to as a black art, it has to be networking. Whilst a simple network can be thrown together with a few network cards and Windows’ built in software, more complicated ones require donating your first born and spending years learning all manner of arcane commands and technologies.

Those who have knowledge of Novell Netware or Windows Server are usually people with lots of training and experience under their belt. The biggest problem with networking though is that it is such a wide field with everything from modems to mainframes chatting across oceans coming under the remit.

What about those of us who just want an overview and understanding of the terminology? What is the best way for learning such stuff? It could well be this book.

How Networks Work is another of Que’s How It Works series. As such it reads almost like a children’s book with page after page of bright bold graphics and even big friendly text. The word count on each page is kept to a minimum creating a nice easy read.

Despite a mere 200 odd pages, this title manages to pack in a very wide range of topics. It starts with the Telegraph and phone networks. These include explanations of the equipment, how they work along with the jargon associated with them.

Punch cards, ASCII versus EBCDIC (The IBM equivalent) and more are examined before moving onto the earliest modems. 300 baud seems pretty tame now but was more than enough for the teletype printers of the day.

Product	How Networks Work
From	www.quepublishing.com
	Bright and breezy coverage that makes all the concepts easy to grasp
	Treat it purely as a beginner's Guide

By chapter 13 things get a little closer to most peoples idea of a network. Here begins Local Area Networks or LANs. These are the kind of networks found in most offices and consist of fileservers and PCs. The different cabling types, topologies and connection methods are all clearly described. Wireless and cellular LANs, thin clients and Enterprise Network Management Systems also get a look in. The authors certainly leave no stone unturned.

Next up comes such esoterica as ATM, ISDN, Circuit Switched Digital Networks, Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs), security issues and all the related hardware including bridgers, routers, repeaters and why you use them.

No book about networks would be complete without mentioning that rather large combination of networks, the Internet. Information here includes the topology of the Internet including some of the main backbones. If you ever wondered quite what your Internet Service Provider (ISP) did, the answers are here. TCP/IP, Domain Name Servers (DNS) and DHCP all get discussed too. For the trainee hacker you can also read about ‘Denial of Service’ attacks although the finer details are understandably missing.

Things finish up with email, the web and Virtual Private Networks. The latter allows you to run a LAN across the Internet – very useful (and cheap!) for corporates operating across different sites or countries.

Summary

We thought this book was a real pleasure to read unlike many books on networking which can often be a bit heavy going. Even though the book is only designed to give a high level overview, we found its breezy layout and clear concise explanations a revelation. We do feel that it is slightly overpriced for the depth of coverage though. That aside, this one comes very highly recommended.