With networks growing larger and more heterogeneous, a good, practical book dealing with network management is highly desirable. The author has over 20 years of network management experience, and this book appears to  reflect  this experience. Chapter 1 defines network management and discusses the process of network management from an OSI  perspective.  The next chapter discusses analog and digital circuit performance measurements: noise, signal-to-noise, distortion, shifts, and so on. In chapter 3, both analog and digital test equipment are described; the  emphasis  is on breakout boxes and protocol analyzers. Chapter 4 discusses performance analysis using FELINE, a PC-based performance analyzer, as a focal point. Network management systems, including IBM’s NetView and AT&T’s  ACCUMASTER,  are discussed in the next chapter. The final chapter covers standards: the ISO reference model, the Communications Management Information Protocol (CMIP), and the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).

The author does not state his purpose in writing the book, but it is primarily a tutorial. The depth of material presented is uneven, but this is not necessarily a flaw. The few pages devoted to analog circuits and their testing are adequate for today’s computer network manager, but taking 30 pages to describe the Network Performance Monitor tool for NetView is a bit much for a 236-page book.

The book is well written. It has few typos, and the index is adequate. Since it is not a textbook, it contains no references or exercises. The intended audience is electrical engineers or people with extensive telecommunications experience. Held provides no glossary of terms and little explanation of such things as time division multiplexers and data service units. If the purpose of this book is to make the reader a network manager, it fails. If its purpose is to give the reader a sense of what must be done to manage a fairly homogeneous data network, it succeeds. (The UNIX world is hardly mentioned, and related network management systems, such as Hewlett-Packard’s OpenView and Sun’s SunNet Manager, are ignored.) The author has written a book on network management as he probably does it, which may not be enough for a general audience.