BKSTEPSL.RVW 931004 Wiley 22 Worchester Road Rexdale, Ontario M9W 1L1 or 605 Third Avenue New York, NY 10158-0012 USA 800-263-1590 "STEPS for Implementing Local Area Networks", Cauchi/Dennison, 1993, U$29.95 When you pick up the book, the title looks reasonable enough. It is not until you start to read it that you find out "Steps" is really "STEPS": Structured Transition and Engineering Planning System." This book is *not* about putting together a LAN, rather it talks about designing a plan. Now, granted, most LAN configurations are sloppy, makeshift and piecemeal. Granted that at least half the problems seen in most LANs could have been solved, in advance, with a little planning and forethought. I'm all for planning. I am not at all sure that this book has much to give to the process. The subtitle states that it is a business guide. That is quite true. It is *not* a technical guide. There are, in fact, absolutely no technical details in it whatsoever. Unfortunately, while it means that senior managers, executives, and project managers of the non-technical type will be comfortable with the content, it may give them a false sense of security. "Needs analysis? Yup. Done that. Tick. What? Traffic analysis? Hmmm. Not quite sure what that is, but we did have everyone fill out a User Profile form; mustn't be important." The senior manager will be comforted by the lack of technical jargon. The technical manager, on the other hand, may be bemused by the extensive business-related jargon, as well as the extensive verbiage. The LAN salesperson or LAN service provider, though, will love the book. Not to read: to wave in the customer's face and say, "See? If you did it yourself, you'd need all this. Trust us." Why is the lack of technical details important? After all, planning is a business function, rather than a technical one. True. A LAN, however, is a technical entity: a very highly technical entity. Without a strong understanding of the technical concepts, many of the planning items fail to have the immediacy they deserve. I have mentioned the needs analysis, and noted that it *doesn't* cover traffic analysis. Chapter two contains many lists of questions to ask about your business and individual users. There is, however, no indication as to how to turn the answers into a "functional specification." For example, the question: "Is there a standard word processor?" If the answer is yes, this may have ramifications for your choice of a LAN topology. Why? If 700 users all want to start WordPerfect every morning, that means 700 copies times 300k per copy. That means 210 megabytes of traffic all at once at 9:00 AM every day. With a 10 mega bit per second ethernet, you will have collisions and an effectiveness of about 10 percent or less. This means a wait of about three and a half minutes. With a "slower" token ring network, the efficiency is almost 100 percent, with a wait of perhaps half a minute. As these calculations rely on technical details which the authors do not include, the "planning" is of use only to consulting firms, which, oddly enough, the authors are. If you are responsible for a thousand-node LAN with dozens of servers, to be built from scratch, and you have a budget for five staff plus outside consulting for the planning phase, buy this book. If you are the manager of a six-desk office wanting to share an expensive plotter, or a twenty-station micro lab wanting to standardize across the programs, and you got this thinking it might help ... you have my sympathies. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1993 BKSTEPSL.RVW 931004 ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Oct. '94) Springer-Verlag