An excellent choice for an overview of TCP/IP networking, this work covers networking from the ground up, from the physical layer up to services like telnet and ftp, touching topics like LDAP on the way. If you have (read) the 3 volumes of "TCP/IP Illustrated" you still may want this one because it is often more to the point than the big brother.

I really think that the authors know what they are talking about (I obviously didn't take the time to try and verify every detail, and don't know the ins and outs off the top of my head), and thoroughly enjoyed reading the work. The only downside is that the English is very quirky at times, and that the proof-readers (if there actually were any) didn't spot a good lot of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.