Optical Networking Crash Course

Author(s): Steven Shepard
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Date : 2001

Optical networking, the big picture. Excellent!, March 31, 2001 By Kenneth Sato (San Ramon, CA USA)

This review is from: Optical Networking Crash Course (Paperback)
Do your network clients need more bandwidth? Do your usage projections say that you need to get off of the copper backbone and start thinking of laying glass? Need to get a handle on optical networking, it's technology, the marketplace and the vendors?

Too much info, too little time? Are you an engineering student wondering if you should take that class on fiber optics and want to read a good primer? Or maybe you are a CTO, CIO, network manager, IT manager, network consultant, or anyone that has a need to know about optical networking and need to come up to speed quickly? Then, this is the optical networking book for you.

Years ago, the first book about fiber I picked up was a scholarly tome filled with logarithmic diagrams, hard to read engineering drawings shrunk to book format and so many formulae and calculus equations I had to put it back into the stack for a time when I couldn't sleep. I wasn't going to engineer the network, I just needed a general idea of what I was working with, we had specialists that actually dealt with the details. This is the book I needed then and today I am better in tune with what's going on in the networking industry.

The book is nicely partitioned into four sections: 1) The Optical Networking Marketplace, 2) From Copper To Glass, 3) Corollary Technologies and 4) Solutions and Applications. It covers some historical details that gives you a feel for why and how the networking marketplace has changed just within the past ten years. The highly technical detail is clearly and simply explained with easy to understand (and read) drawings and diagrams. You are not overloaded with acronyms, just what you need to know and if you have any doubt, there's a list of acronyms, a bibliography, a glossary and an index in the back.

A really nice touch that I appreciate about this book is the use of a few real life photos, so we don't forget that the technology doesn't all take place on a written page. There's one photo of men hauling a floated fiber cable from an offshore cabling ship onto land for termination. Another is a "drawing tower" where fiber is stretched/drawn.

You might say, this is a scholarly text cleverly hidden inside a humorous, easy to read book. In addition, besides the Internet itself, this book is a very current assessment of the market and vendors in the fiber, optical component and services areas of this critical industry.

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