On May 29, 2012, at 5:33 PM, Lynda wrote: > *Any* suggestions are welcome, including suggested resources, and I'll > probably just put this up on my site once I'm done, for others to refer to.
This reference is tragically both non-free and appears in a book focused on a particular vendor, but I wanted to throw it out there for you anyway because I like it so much: JUNOS Enterprise Switching Harry Reynolds and Doug Marschke Published by O'Reilly: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596153984.do The link above has a "Google Preview" button so you can actually skim some of the book get a feel for it. I want to recommend the first chapter of the book to you (the rest is good also, but it deals with Juniper and not general networking). The first chapter is an overview/review of LAN and IP networking. Even though I "knew" all this when I read the book, it was a succinct tour of "how we got here" (Ethernet and IP). They say history is written by the winners, and this chapter focuses on the technologies used by most networks today (with short mentions of Token Ring, OSI, etc). It's a fast read, a fair amount of fun, and would probably help you brainstorm the key points you'd want to explore in a talk of your own. It's not going to cover all the gory details of the last 50 years (slotted Aloha, manchester encoding, FDDI, etc), but in terms of technologies relevant to today it's the best 50 pages I've read in a while (Ethernet, ARP, IP/TCP/UDP, bridges, switches, routers, and a bunch of protocol specifics). It's not really geared towards the total beginner, but for someone who knows a bit about networks and can fill in the gaps it's a great read. Also, though the book is about JUNOS, the first chapter is almost completely free of any vendor-specific stuff (that starts in chapter 2), so you need not worry that it's going to bog down in proprietary syntax. Hope that's helpful, Jason -- Jason Healy | [email protected] | http://www.logn.net/ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
