VPNs: A Beginner's Guide

Requires some effort to read and understand especially for beginners and students.

Covers a lot of the VPN spectrum and is easy to read.It would be nice to have a more complete comparison table to understand how VPN solutions stand against each other.It does not talk about the new breed of relayed VPNs such as WallCooler VPN [...] or Hamachi [...].Definitely worth keeping as a reference.

VPN class 101 is now in session. this is a perfect book for a beginners guide. maybe the should use that in the name.. Oh well I'll let them take credit if they do.

Love it. It is the best.

Somebody might want to tell this guy this book is not for beginners at all. It is a perfect example of an intellectual condescendingly defining what is beginners level. The editors should have said something. Maybe if they figured this out the book would actually be worth something at the point.

Dated material now, needs an update or re-write

This is a terrible book that I wouldn't recommend to my worst enemy.Aside from being extremely dated (published in 2001), the book is chock full of factual errors, and generalizations and unfounded opinions presented as authoritative fact. Anybody reading and taking it as gospel will have a distorted and skewed perspective on VPN technologies.The only value at all I can see to this book is that it provides an interesting perspective on how things have changed since 2001, and how the author's ideas and assumptions about how things would look in the (then) future were wrong. But the outright errors make even that of dubious value.

This book does a good job covering the details of the various protocols and standards used in different types of VPN's. But the same information can be pulled in nearly the same format from RFC's.After the first few chapters, the book get's confusing and is sometimes wrong when the author describes the process behind setup of a IPSEC VPN connection (there's a couple of places where AH is confused with ESP). Beyond that I found the book hard to follow because it lacks a broad comparison between different types of VPN's (why you would want to choose one type over another and so forth).But even more irking was paying [item price] for a book that's full of typo's and repetitive sentences.