Re: New book out

[David Perkins <[e-mail]>]

I bought "SNMP, SNMPv2, and CMIP" on May 22, and have been
reviewing it. 

The book has great potential, but I felt disappointed when
reading it. Stallings has a great talent for summarizing
and organizing, but seems to lack a real understanding
of some of the key concepts. (This may be due to a lack
of implementation, deployment, and operational experience,
but this is only a guess on my part.) 

His decision to include a section on "Secure SNMP" as defined
by RFCs 1351, 1352, and 1353 (which are now HISTORICAL) seems
quite questionable.  Another questionable decision by Stallings
is not using a group of experienced reviewers to go over
the book. Yes, Cheryl Krupczak reviewed the chapters on CMIP,
and Steve Waldbusser got a credit for a "useful insight" and
an "instructive example", but who are the people with
indepth knowledge of SNMPv1/v2 who reviewed the rest of
the book?

The book has quite a few errors and ommisions. For example,
page 157 describes SNMPv1 traps. One page, and the is no mention
of RFC 1215 which descripes how to specify and interpret TRAPs.
The RFC is not even in the index! (It did make it in table 4.1)

I feel quite disappointed in Stallings for not sending any comments
to the SNMPv2 mailing list about "problems" in the SNMPv2 documents.
How could someone who is going to the level of understanding
a subject enough to write about it, not spot some of the glaring
problems in the SNMPv2 documents. (These are mainly in RFCs
1445 and 1446 which are scheduled for rewrites.) And
besides the big areas, I can't remember any public messages
from Stallings about the small, but important stuff like typos,
dangling references, fuzzyness, etc.

Sorry for the flame, I sort of feel like everyone should give back
to the community for the profit that they have made or will make
when it is based on the donated time, money, and energy of others.

And as always for opinions, this is mine and does not represent
my employer`s.
/dave perkins