Books , O'Reilly Reviews , Tech

IPv6 Essentials

A good "leg-up" ★★★☆☆

There's a fundamental change occurring on the Internet: the venerable Internet Protocol by which all nodes communicate is being replaced with a new version, IPv6. Silvia Hagen's IPv6 Essentials provides engineers with a good leg-up to understanding the wide-ranging impacts of the new protocol.

That said, there's still a lot of legwork for the reader to do. This is not a gentle tutorial. By necessity it covers many technical areas in significant depth, sometimes bordering on being just a little bit too dry in its presentation. With so much material to cover, I'm sure the author faced a chicken-and-egg dilemma about what to present first. I imagine reading it a second time will be a much easier prospect.

The shining gem is chapter eight, which describes Mobile IPv6. The ability for a device to migrate seamlessly from one network to another without breaking sessions might not seem to be an "essential" part of the core protocol suite, but by reading the details I developed a genuine admiration for how the individual elements of IPv6 work together.

There's a wealth of information in this book. Sometimes the structure irked me, and I would have liked more tabular presentation that can be used for reference. However, it's bang up-to-date — a good thing since many technologies recommended over the past twenty years to aid the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 are no longer recommended, as the author points out.

It's undoubtedly be a book I come back to regularly as the transition gathers momentum.

[Note: I received a free electronic copy of this book through the O'Reilly Reader Review Program.]