True confessions of Adrian Mole is totally in the same path with the first two ones,only Adrian's developing thoughthes are diffirent.If you liked the first ones and looking forward to read another one whistl accepting the nature of "first is always the best",you should read this one.

Don't get me wrong. I love the PBS Radio Show "Click and Clack", but Peters and Townsend are supposed to be legendary management guru's who've made millions as business sages with all of the answers, not a couple of greasy mechanics. But I think the mechanic brothers could offer far more relevant business advice than this pair of has-beens.

Management books aren't known for their 'science', but this tape is essentially two guys talking about some old jobs they had. At cynical moment, their success is actually attributed mostly to 'luck'. Most of their real suggestions are wholly impractical in that they involve the freedom to willfully fire their employees in a manner that would impossible, possibly even illegal, for most companies.

Now this is common to many business motiviational teachings, but why, after all of the advice on getting the right people and paying the right people, is there a long section at the end when ambitious employees are chastised to never ask for a raise (rewards always find their way to those that deserve it, right?) Could it be that the royalties from guru books are nothing compared to the royalties from big companies willing to pay $80,000 a day for this week's management fad? No company is going to buy advice that reminds hoards of employees to ask what they are worth. But now I'm being cynical.

I am very sorry to see this book still in print and still on the virtual shelves. It is by far the worst book on SNMP I have ever read. The factual errors in this book are too numerous to detail...suffice it to say that where it deals with important aspects of SNMP and applications built on SNMP it is either wrong, misleading, or incomplete far more often than not. I posted a detailed analysis to one of the IETF SNMP lists (after trying unsuccessfully to communicate with the author) when I bought the book when it first came out. I honestly don't remember the specifics...but I am certain that this book would do more harm than good to anyone setting out to write his or her first SNMP application. Fortunately, intervening developments (such as SNMPv3, AgentX, WinSNMP, etc.) have made this book all but totally irrelevant anyway.

I've purchased any number of un-stellar computer books in my time, but this one is truly worthless. Its strongest topic is probably on building MIBs, but even there it won't help you much. If you're looking for material on building management stations or customized monitoring applications, keep looking. In numerous places, the author asserts that common belief is incorrect (e.g. "One factor not clearly understood is that there is an SNMP response to every SNMP command.") but then fails to provide the correct information. A substantial amount of ink at various places in the book is devoted to history and evolution of the standards, without an apparent tie to the subject at hand. Organization of subject matter is apparently largely random, with wild leaps from one topic to the next.

It seems likely that the author has at best a fuzzy grasp of his subject matter, coupled with a some hidden agenda for the evolution of network monitoring.

Apparently basic editorship was considered an unnecessary luxury, as the book is full of grammatical errors.

This book gets your hopes up, then fails to deliver. The concepts are not explained clearly, the technical parts don't go into enough detail, and the grammar is shaky. On the plus side, it contains a lot of pointers to additional sources of information on SNMP.