We've been having some interesting network issues that I've been tracking down and we've been trying to figure out how to set up our clients with our datacenter in Miami. I came across a book whose title looked interesting - Network Warrior by Gary A. Donahue. It is an O'Reilly book, so I was pretty confident I'd learn at least something from it (O'Reilly has done a great job building up their brand - goes to show you how powerful a good brand can be). So, I picked it up. I didn't really need everything that was in the 500+ pages (it is very Cisco centric, which I gathered from the subtitle) but it had a lot of useful information about networks in general. I read some parts completely and skimmed others (since we're not using Cisco) and definitely learned a lot.

While I have over two decades of experience with computers, I am a novice with networks and I appreciated the chapters on switches, VLANs, routing and Quality of Service. It was written well enough that I could understand the basics and the graphics he used helped me understand the concepts.

Donahue has some great comments in the back about how to sell your ideas to management and how to be more professional (instead of just a techie).

Overall it was certainly worth my time reading this. If you are interested in a better understanding of how networks and network transports work, this would be a useful read. If you're a network expert and don't need to deal with Cisco equipment, it's probably a waste of time.