Excellent Introduction, in the opinion of a Telecom newcomer   July 16, 2004

Please, please, please do not let the bad reviews of this book discourage you from checking it out. I just finished reading the entire book, and wanted to log on to share my high opinion of it.


Excellent Telecom Overview   January 25, 2004
  2 out of 5 found this review helpful

As an industry outsider with limited technical experience, I found this book informative, easy-to-follow, and entertaining. My compliments to the author for a job well done.


a scatterbrained mess...   November 14, 2003
  65 out of 68 found this review helpful

First off, a word of warning: Pay heed to the reader's words from Woburn Mass, all of the 5 star reviews of this book actually are from people who are mentioned in the book's acknowledgements.

I purchased this book mostly to learn about telephony. I already know a lot about data networking, and I wanted to expand my knowledge of other aspects of telecom and optical WAN technologies like SONET and SDH. I knew I was in for trouble after reading about 50 pages. Have you ever read a technical book where you had a really hard time absorbing the info, even when you re-read the same paragraphs over and over again? Well, chances are it's not your fault, it's the author's! I can say this for sure about this book, b/c it described stuff that I already know about, and after reading it, I was more confused than before!

Part of the problem is the author's complete lack of organizational logic. On page 2, he describes all of the "techno-jargon" that permeates the telecom industry, and "often gets in the way of the relatively straightforward task of learning how all this stuff actually works". I totally agree, jargon should not obfuscate. BUT, if you're going to point out this common pitfall, you best avoid it yourself, and Shepard does not! He's all over the board, dropping terms and concepts with little or no explanation. About 10 pages in, it's already a muddled mess.

The mess gets worse. He discusses all of these different approaches to multiplexing, but doesn't take the time to explain what the basic process of multiplexing is all about until page 200! Throughout the entire book, he constantly refers to switching versus routing, but he doesn't explain the basic processes until the final 2 pages! These are just a couple examples that stuck out in my mind.

To be sure, there is some useful information to be gleaned here, but it's hard to sort out from all the "noise". Shepard gets into way too much detail on certain subjects and not enough on others, without any discernable logic. For example, he spends several pages discussing how fiber cables are manufactured, but spends less than one page discussing the basic processes of routing and switching. However, given the topic of the book, isn't the latter subject a lot more applicable? As far as I know, telecom professionals don't need to make the actual fiber cables.

This book is too technical for someone who doesn't know anything about telecom, and it's not practical enough for someone who knows a lot. If you're in between like me, you stand to gain a decent high-level overview of the industry, but the details are murky at best.


entertaining but lightweight   July 21, 2003
  29 out of 32 found this review helpful

The author has a knack for seeing the big picture and coming up with funny metaphors to describe it (see Austrailian rules football in the other review). Also, he has a lot of friends in the business - four of the 5 star reviews below are from people listed in the acknowledgements. There is technical material here but the selection is sort of random, so you may or may not find a detailed explanation of a subject you're looking for. But his brief discussion of JPEG compression was so absurdly wrong it made me less enthusiastic about reading through the rest of his technical presentations.

I won't say this book is worthless, because he does have a marketer's flair for making business sense of technology and predicting trends, and there is probably enough material here to fill a few good magazine articles. One of them, on the psychology of computer hacking (inserted in the middle of a discussion of the OSI protocol stack), unfortunately has nothing to do with telecom. Also, the mini-Esperanto/English dictionary is entertaining but probably should have been left for the author's web site. I mean, I agree that's funny, but there are those of us who paid for a book on telecom.


The complete telecom overview   October 16, 2002
  13 out of 18 found this review helpful

If I were starting out in the telecommuncations field, this would be the first book that I'd recommend that anyone read. It gives you a high level look at: what protocols do and are used for; what the primary access technologies are; a great description of the telephony system that provides the main infrastructure of the Internet; and, the primary transport technologies that are being used today.
Because this is a "crash course" book don't look for great detail in every topic, however, if you are looking for a compendium that covers the telecomm field all in one book then this is the book you need. My networking background has been mostly in the copper and fiber optic technologies, so I found the sections about the new 802.11 wireless technologies the most interesting. But some of things that I found unique for a book like this and most fascinating are the pictures of scenes and equipment taken inside of actual telephone central offices and the anecdotes about real life happenings in the telecommuncations world. For those of you interested in the state of the telecommuncations industry, you may want to go straight to the last chapter entitled "Final Thoughts" where the author gives some very interesting comments about the industry on a global view.
So if you have anything to do with telecommunications, be it as a user, CTO, IT manager, technology student, technology teacher, marketing or sales person of telecom or buyer of telecom, then this book should have a place on your desk.