Preliminary review of the Wiley RADIUS book.
I've taken a quick look at the Wiley RADIUS Book, and I have to say it looks like a significant effort. 300 pages, $120, and the table of contents covers a wide variety of topics.
My only question, though, is how useful it will be for the average administrator. The summary says
This text will provide researchers in academia and industry, network security engineers, managers, developers and planners, as well as graduate students,with an accessible explanation of the standards fundamental to secure mobile access.
I find that summary a little daunting, quite frankly. The first target audience is researchers. And from reading the sample chapter contents, I agree that researchers are a good target for this book. I've been working with RADIUS for a long time, and it took me some effort to understand the text.
Based on a preliminary review, this book appears useful if you're:
- a researcher,
- using mobile IP,
- using IPsec,
- using Diameter.
For the average administrator intent on deploying RADIUS, that book is probably too much. It looks to have some RADIUS content (20 pages or so), some overview of AAA architectures (50 pages or so), but the majority of it is devoted to issues that just don't come up in common RADIUS deployments.
The overlap between that book and Deploying RADIUS: Practices and Principles appears to be pretty minimal. My book will concentrate on practice, and not on research. i.e. Administrators are less concerned with how something works than with how to get a job done.
That's where Deploying RADIUS will shine.