This is a wonderful book to understanding how the linux networking code works. Good coverage of networking code for a beginner-developer to grasp.

In "The Audience for This Book" section it says that "..newcomers will be able to get up to speed quickly, too". That is patently untrue. This is probably a good book for someone completely knowledgeable on the workings of the kernel and who has a solid programming background. I may, after considerable further study, find this book useful. For the time being this book is a functional door stop.

I have read a number of books on the TCP/IP protocols and their implementations; both the original Berkeley (BSD) Unix TCP/IP stack and the Linux TCP/IP stack. I must say that this is the best of all of them. This book makes the subject very approachable for the newcomer to network protocol software but the explanations are detailed enough to satisfy an old dog like me. Benvenuti's writing style is clear and very readable. He liberally provides diagrams to illustrate the concepts he is discussing.

My only fault with the book is that the transport layer protocols (UDP and TCP) are not covered. Benvenuti provides a list of important areas of the networking software that are not covered in the book but gives other references for most of these. I hope that he is working on a volume 2 to cover these areas.

I would sum up by saying that if you want to learn about the Linux networking software or network protocol software in general, start with this book. This book will give you the background to understand other, less well written books that cover the remaining networking software topics.

Are you a newcomer who already has some knowledge of networking? If you are, then this book is for you! Author Christian Benvenuti, has done an outstanding job of writing practical guide that represents a good starting point for anyone willing to learn more about the Linux kernal internals.

Benvenuti, begins by introducing you to the basic knowledge you need to understand the rest of the book comfortably. Then, the author will show you how and when network devices are initialized and registered with the kernal. He also puts into context all of the features that can influence the path of a packet inside the kernal, and to give you an idea of the big picture. Next, he looks at the link layer or L2 counterpart of routing: bridging. The author continues by explaining the main drawbacks of version 4 of the IP protocol and shows you how IPv6 tries to address them. He also discusses how the router and the application host know who each other are. Finally, he introduces the routing process, and how it plays a central role in the Linux networking code.

In this most excellent book, the author shows you how Linux carries out the complicated tasks assigned to it by the IP protocols. More importantly, one of the strengths of this book is that it integrates the pieces and shows you the relationships between far flung functions and data structures.

The book is written with amazing clarity -- having constantly to read inadequate, ungrammatical, and disjointed drivel in datasheets, I am especially sensitive to and appreciative of good, cogent writing. The author, clearly, is an bona-fide expert in his field: every page of this book I got to so far contained something I was curious about or was struggling with. Not in general, more like within the past week. The author is constantly one step ahead of the reader's thought -- I'm reading one page and thinking, this is really well done, I wish this guy wrote a book on device drivers and interrupt handling -- and two pages later he does precisely this, in depth, in detail, no vapor, no muddle, everything right on the money. Good index, good illustrations, well written, well edited -- everything, everything's perfect. I got home pretty late and found this book in my mailbox, so I thought, all right, I gotta go to bed, but just to wind down I'll flip through sorta thing: read the colophon and the table of contents, admire the pictures, enjoy the smell of new book, five minutes, no more. Well, five minutes later I was reading it straight through and I didn't get much sleep that night.

Btw, it's not just your typical code walk-through (although the book does this as well), it truly is a wide-ranging discussion of many networking concepts and artifacts, explained on the basis of the linux implementation. This book is not for linux only, it's going to be just as useful for anyone working with embedded systems, for example: the code is different, but the problems are the same. Even if you work with Windows, this book will be instructive! The closest you can get to Windows anything is something like "Windows Internals", and although it is a good book, it is not showing you the real stuff, and as a result you never quite know if you got it, or you didn't get it, or you think you got it but maybe you're mistaken. Here in addition to being very clearly articulated, the real thing is actually shown itself, and a ten-line code excerpt is quicker and clearer to understand than 20 pages of condescending baby-talking drivel MSPress style. So, even if you're writing an NDIS driver, read this book -- your chip is the same, the box is the same, the real world is the same, only the OS infrastructure is different (and even that infrastructure you'll understand better if you read a relevant linux book). This is the buy of the year. Last year's was "Network Algorithmics" by Varghese, from MK. Get and read them both.

If you work with networking, don't think, just get this book -- whatever the platform you're dealing with.