Book available at:
This deeply perceptive techie review of The Story
of PING was first seen with attribution to a different author outside the US. Amazon.com later
removed what was possibly the original review. Soon after, the same (or slightly revised) Reader
Review text appeared again as shown below. Thanks for restoring it Compton USA. It's a keeper...
hehehe
[June 15, 2004 Ping update: I just found a copy of this review at kohala.com with what I believe is a closer attribution to the original source that I read at Amazon several years ago (March 7, 1999 is definitely the correct timeframe of my first sighting):
A reader from Upper Volta, Uzbekistan, March 7, 1999
The primary difference in versions you might locate on the Internet is that latter review postings omit the paragraph reading: "This book avoids many of the cliches..." Also, kohala.com has the last eight words of that paragraph. The second version, which I managed to grab before Amazon again deleted the review, dropped the last six words and changed the previous two words to nonsense. Later postings omit this short paragraph entirely. I believe the Upper Volta, Uzbekistan attribution has a high probability of being correct. Who the author was, I do not know. If you know the source, please "ping me" with a name or link. Thanks! ~adalie]
The Story About Ping
by
Marjorie Flack
,
Kurt Wiese
(Illustrator)
 |
List Price:
Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours. |
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 6,736
Avg. Customer Review: 
Number of Reviews: 8
A reader from Compton, USA , March 12, 1999
PING! The magic
duck!
Using deft allegory, the authors have provided an
insightful and intuitive explanation of one of Unix's most venerable networking utilities. Even more
stunning is that they were clearly working with a very early beta of the program, as their book first
appeared in 1933, years (decades!) before the operating system and network infrastructure were
finalized.
The book describes networking in terms even a child could understand, choosing to anthropomorphize the underlying packet structure. The ping packet is described as a duck, who, with other packets (more ducks), spends a certain period of time on the host machine (the wise-eyed boat). At the same time each day (I suspect this is scheduled under cron), the little packets (ducks) exit the host (boat) by way of a bridge (a bridge). From the bridge, the packets travel onto the internet (here embodied by the Yangtze River).
The title character -- er, packet, is called Ping. Ping meanders around the river before being received by another host (another boat). He spends a brief time on the other boat, but eventually returns to his original host machine (the wise-eyed boat) somewhat the worse for wear.
The book avoids many of the cliches one might expect. For example, with a story set on a river, the authors might have sunk to using that tired old device: the flood ping. The authors deftly avoid this.
If you need a good, high-level overview of the ping utility, this is the book. I can't recommend it for most managers, as the technical aspects may be too overwhelming and the basic concepts too daunting.
Problems With This Book
As good as it is, The Story About Ping is not without its faults. There is no index, and though the ping(8) man pages cover the command line options well enough, some review of them seems to be in order. Likewise, in a book solely about Ping, I would have expected a more detailed overview of the ICMP packet structure.
But even with these problems, The Story About Ping has earned a place on my bookshelf, right between Stevens' Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, and my dog-eared copy of Dante's seminal work on MS Windows, Inferno. Who can read that passage on the Windows API ("Obscure, profound it was, and nebulous, So that by fixing on its depths my sight -- Nothing whatever I discerned therein."), without shaking their head with deep understanding. But I digress.
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