chris@yarra.oz.au (Chris Jankowski) (09/02/90)
From RFC1175:
Rose, Marshall T., The Open Book: A Practical Perspective on OSI, 651
pgs., Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1989.
This is a comprehensive book about Open Systems Interconnection
(OSI). In particular, this book focuses on the pragmatic aspects
of OSI: what OSI is, how OSI is implemented, and how OSI is
integrated with existing networks. In order to provide this
pragmatic look at OSI the book makes consistent comparisons and
analogies of the OSI pieces with the TCP/IP suite of networking
protocols.
What do you think about the book? Is it worth buying?
What I am after is a book which would be an equivalent of the Comer's
book on Internet but obout OSI.
How would you compare it with the Comer's book on Internet?
Is it similar in style, depth, objective and clarity?
I'll summarise if enough responses received.
Thank you.
-m------- Chris Jankowski - Senior Systems Engineer chris@yarra.oz{.au}
---mmm----- Pyramid Technology Corporation Pty. Ltd. fax +61 3 820 0536
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-------mmmmmmm- Melbourne, Victoria, 3004 AUSTRALIA (03) 820 0711
micron n. - a unit of length of one milionth of a meter,
worth $2,000,000,000 since the fault in the Hubble space telescope
mirror has been identified.barns@GATEWAY.MITRE.ORG (09/05/90)
To my kmnowledge, no book comparable to Comer exists for OSI and I doubt that one will be created any time soon. Open Book is about the best available and you might as well buy it (everyone else does), but it isn't as concrete as Comer because in the OSI world, these things are still being figured out. I think that is a limitation we just have to accept for a while yet. And in part, it will probably exist forever, because OSI is rather broader than TCP/IP and thus won't be able to be covered to the same depth in anything like the same number of pages, once we have figured out the right details. This is wild speculation, but I'd estimate a treatment of ALL of the OSI protocols to comparable depth would run about 5000 pages. /Bill Barns
Stef@NRTC.NORTHROP.COM (Einar Stefferud) (09/07/90)
> To my kmnowledge, no book comparable to Comer exists for OSI and > I doubt that one will be created any time soon. Open Book is about the > best available and you might as well buy it (everyone else does), Damn faint praise, it seems to me. Better to note that the OPEN BOOK is the best there is for OSI today, and perhaps for years to come, though we could hope that more good authors would come to the fore with good books on OSI. > but it isn't as concrete as Comer because in the OSI world, these > things are still being figured out. Don't forget that the Comer book does not cover some very imporant TCP/IP topics, like X and NFS. It is also weak on applications like MAIL. In short, the Comer book only covers a portion of the total TCP/IP suite. No one covers it all (either). > I think that is a limitation we just have to accept for a while yet. > And in part, it will probably exist forever, because OSI is rather > broader than TCP/IP and thus won't be able to be covered to the same > depth in anything like the same number of pages, once we have figured > out the right details. This is wild speculation, but I'd estimate a > treatment of ALL of the OSI protocols to comparable depth would run > about 5000 pages. /Bill Barns Well, I expect that you are right about how it is not possible to write a reasonable sized book to cover all of OSI, but one aught to be able to write good books about portions of OSI. I think that is what Marshall Rose did in the OPEN BOOK. Now it is someone else's turn to do it for another portion. Best...\Stef
briel@sctc.com (Marc Briel ) (09/07/90)
Could someone post the full reference for this book? I would like to look into getting a copy. Thanks, Marc Briel briel@sctc.com
barns@GATEWAY.MITRE.ORG (09/08/90)
I hadn't actually intended for my message to go out to the whole list, but since it did (through my error), I suppose I should clarify it. I don't have problems with what is in Open Book, taken on its own terms. Also I agree that Comer's book has limitations. But the way the original question was posed led me to interpret it as "I want a book that tells me the things about OSI internetworking that Comer's book tells me about TCP/IP internetworking - how well does Open Book do that job?" And in my opinion, there is maybe a 60% overlap in scope between them. For me, the 40% difference is enough to make them "not comparable". It isn't a question of better or worse, just a difference in scope and areas of emphasis. So if you want a Comer-like boook on OSI, you buy the Open Book for the sake of the 60%, and if you like the other 40% of Open Book, that's gravy. Someone might reasonably ask just which areas are covered by one and not the other. I don't have time to assemble a list, but the most striking thing to me is that Comer is relatively heavier on what OSI would term network and transport layer issues, and Rose is heavier on upper layers. /Bill Barns
bygg@sunic.sunet.se (Johnny Eriksson) (09/08/90)
In article <1990Sep7.145916.23593@sctc.com> briel@sctc.com (Marc Briel) writes: > Could someone post the full reference for this book? I would like to look > into getting a copy. Title: The Open Book : A practical persective on OSI Author: Marshall T. Rose ISBN: 0-13-643016-3 Prentice Hall