Microsoft Windows Internals, Fourth Edition: Microsoft Windows Server(TM) 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000 (Pro-Developer)

Managing NFS and NIS, 2nd Edition

Filesystems

Implementing CIFS: The Common Internet File System

Format: Paperback
Author: Christopher Hertel
ReleaseDate: 14 August, 2003
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
Rating:

Monopoly
The empirical knowledge implied by frequent contrasts between the specifications and what happens "on the wire" is impressive. The information is helpful and appears to be complete.

One criticism is that the prose is conversational with many self-conscious references to the author and reader. This makes reading somewhat inefficient and irritating at times.

Excellent technical reference
The internals of the CIFS protocol is not a subject for the faint hearted, but Chris has really tackled it well. I really like this book. This is just the right book for people like me who want to understand what is going on on their network at the bits and bytes level.

In the Samba Team we have been working on implementing the protocols that Chris describes in this book for the last 12 years or so, but we've always been doing this from sniffer traces and incomplete specifications. It was quite an interesting experience to see all this information distilled into such a readable format.

This isn't the sort of book that one buys grandma for Christmas, but if you run a Windows network and have been curious about what is happening inside all those network packets, how your computers find each other and what that weird error message really means then do yourself a favor and have a read.

Andrew Tridgell
Samba Team.

In-depth discussion of CIFS implementation.
It goes into detail of CIFS implementation. If want to know CIFS/SAMBA/NetBIOS internals, this is the book to read. You will find discussion on structures, functions, and architecture of CIFS. This is a very good book for programmers who are working in this area. Although the book is useful for general users of CIFS but the real audience are the programmers and people who want to go into in-depth knowledge of CIFS implementation. You should know C programming to really benefit from this book.