Top-Down Network Design - Cisco Press

Cisco Press has an enviable reputation for producing quality networking textbooks for all skill levels. PCstats has had the pleasure of reviewing several of their texts before, and found them to be generally excellent. Today we'll be looking at one of their newest networking publications, the second edition of Priscilla Oppenheimer's " Top-Down Network Design." According to the author, this 530-page hardcover manual is intended to teach networking professionals the essentials and procedures required to plan, design, implement and test a business network. Not a book for networking beginners, nor does it claim to be.

This second edition Cisco Press  book adds additional information on wireless networks, VPNs, security and redundancy, voice networks and several other topics to the original text.

Design and writing style

Top-Down Network Design is intended to be more of an instruction on approaches and methods than an actual practical guide to building business networks. Given the enormous number of different procedures required in the implementation of such a network, this focus is not surprising. What this book will help you to do is to plan out such networks logically and present the information to clients in a focused manner.

Chapters are laid out logically throughout, with informative subheadings that effectively break up the information into digestible chunks. The book uses a traditional presentation style with occasional notes and illustrations. several chapters include a summary and a handy checklist for ticking off the major points presented in the chapter against your actual network design. Other chapters include comprehensive case studies of the chapter material. This is a nice touch which helps pull the book out of the realm of the merely theoretical and into real world usefulness.

I was slightly less enthused with the writing style. The author clearly has an excellent grasp of the subject matter, but explanations in the book are often more complex than they need to be. To be fair, this is a professional-level manual, but it seems to me that simple and concise writing and explanations are too often relegated only to beginner level textbooks when they should be universally employed.

Top down Network Design

As you can probably tell from the title, the book is based on the Top Down network Design principle. to put it simply, the Top-Down principle involves designing a logical network to accommodate your customer's current and future business plans and needs then creating or adapting the physical network to these specifications.

This avoids the pitfalls that may develop if you build your physical network before taking your employer's future business needs into account. Top-down network design operates on the very logical idea that the network should be the servant of the business, not the other way round.