Over the last 10 weeks or so, I’ve been back to teaching in my day job, which has largely been a good experience, despite how much my blog has suffered due to the changes in my schedule. We are now just getting into the really meaty stuff on interior routing protocols, covering RIP, EIGRP, and OSPF, and as part of that, I thought some of the stuff from my Cisco: The Complete Reference book (mainly the route processing bits) might be helpful for the students.
So I went back and checked out the PDF’s that (apparent) McGraw Hill is selling online, and realized that they are drastically different than the print version. By this, I mean the content is the same, but all of the graphics are very low resolution, and the whole thing looks really low budget. Those of you who have seen the print version know that it was very nice looking, as is the case with the entire Complete Reference series.
This wouldn’t be so bad (aesthetics are nice, but it is the content that matters), but they lowered the resolution on the graphics so much that some of them, including the flow charts on route processing, are completely illegible! This burns me up. To me, those are the crowning achievement of the book, and are completely unique out of all books on the subject.
I actually purchased and spent days poring over the Loop-Free Routing Using Diffusing Computations paper to make sure I had the DUAL’s behavior correct, and I spent similar time pouring over numerous texts on OSPF to get the same thing.
So, I decided to fix it. Here is a link to a zip file with a more correct version of chapter 26 (OSPF). This file includes copy of the pre-production PDF of Chapter 26, and several PDFs with the original flow charts or improved versions of them. I hope this helps people who are left with the crappy PDF version that is circulating out there, even if you pirated it.
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