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Computer Book Store > Computer books beginning with T
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TCP/IP Architecture, Design and Implementation in Linux (Practitioners) |
Author: Sameer Seth
Published: 2008-12-10 |
List price: $105.00
Our price: $84.00
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Usually ships in 24 hours
As of: September 09th, 2010 05:14:35 AM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 comprehensive description of the Linux protocol-socket interactions
I've been several months eager to have a book describing the TCP/IP stack details and especially the interactions between the protocol stack and the socket system calls, especially having no response from the Linux networking kernel development communities (I don't criticize them but it is the fact that the kernel coders are busy with making new patches rather than helping others to understand the existing things). Therefore i ordered this book even without having seen any preliminary user comments on the Amazon web site.
The most attractive feature of the book is that the authors, attempting to share their understandings to the users, carefully organized topics with a natural logic that a kernel newbie is easy to follow. For example, there are several data structures regarding the TCP bind sockets but the source codes themselves are written in a quite confusing and inconsistent way, making it very hard to extract the role and usage of each of the structures. The authors list them all first and then dive into each with conceptual diagrams for the big picture of the data structure organizations. A typical fashion of discussion is applied throughout most of the topics, starting from the involved data structures as well as their organizations, and then walking through how the system calls interact with the protocol stack functions in manipulating these structures. It is clear that the authors are really experienced in modifying/customizing the Linux networking kernel.
The most unacceptable drawback of the book is, as another reviewer ever stated, the book contains a lot of typo and format errors. Because of them, the book looks like a rush result. Hope the revision will make out an elegant work.
It is a little pity that the book doesn't involve the UDP and raw sockets yet. However, I'd prefer to have such a TCP-only version first instead of waiting another half a year to have a more comprehensive one. The authors have promised UDP for the next edition but i'd like to suggest having the raw sockets as well, because the communication without port is not the same with the cases having the transport-layer identifiers.
The book covers an older version of Linux kernel, version 2.4, rather than the most updated 2.6, but this is understandable because such a work is very time-consuming. Personally i do think a book should be helpful in understanding problems rather than uncovering every algorithms. This book has achieved that.
Anyway, to my personal point of view, though there is very big and obvious room to improve the book, it contains currently the most comprehensive explanation over the TCP/IP stack in the Linux kernel. therefore I give 5 stars to the book and highly encourage the authors continuing the work, making the successive edition fully qualified.
The book is highly recommended to those who are trying to understand the linux networking kernel and making some modifications in it. it is suggested not only to read the book but also to read the original source code simultaneously, especially with a certain purpose of doing some research or development works.
For those who are using this book with new 2.6 Linux kernel, a careful comparison between the code of version 2.4 and that of 2.6 is necessary. The networking part in the version 2.6 is significantly changed from version 2.4 with introducing inet_ hash tables to replace the previous tcp hash data structures. However, following the clue that the book ever provided, one can get his/her own extraction on the current version 2.6 without much difficulty.
 Useful, though not as good as I hoped
This book is useful if you want to better understand Linux _TCP_ internals (i.e. not just IP). There are several good books describing Linux networking internals for link-layer, IP, routing, neighbouring etc. - but no books of the same quality for TCP and UDP yet.
There are two main problems with the book:
- it is written for 2.4 kernels only (no 2.6)
- there is a huge number of typos, stylistic and grammatical errors
Even though the authors write in the preface: "The newest kernel version 2.6 does not have much variation as far as the TCP/IP stack is considered", this is only partially true. Most important algorithms are the same, but there were many new features; structures layout is rather different (they changed it several times even in 2.6 kernels).
For a description of Linux networking internals not related to TCP I would rather recommend "Understanding Linux Network Internals" by Christian Benvenuti.
The book provides nice descriptions of TCP algorithms - both generic and Linux-specific. For example, if you want to understand the management of synqueue/acceptqueue (what does it mean that connection is 'young'?), the book provides a very detailed and easy to understand description. The same is true for timers management, core processing and state machine.
The chapter about debugging is rather outdated - it describes LKCD/lcrash environment but all new kernels have kexec/kdump facility and 'crash' is the preferred debugger for those vmcores. Maybe 2.4 kernels and lkcd are still relevant for embedded Linux (2.4 has a smaller memory footprint), I am mainly interested in normal systems.
So this book is the best we have for Linux TCP internals at this moment. The authors promise to update the description for 2.6 kernels in the next edition. Hopefully typos/errors will be fixed either and then the book would be highly recommended.
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