The Wireshark Field Guide: Analyzing and Troubleshooting Network Traffic

With a pile of 6 Cisco books and over 4000 pages to read and understand, I can't afford the time for every topic I read to be 1000's of pages long. The 128 pages of the Wireshark Field Guide is a quick and understandable read allowing me to use this packet capture and analysis tool more effectively. For those wanting more out of the tool, it makes sense to understand where in the network Wireshark is to be placed, and how to configure a switch to send a copy of the traffic to your laptop running Wireshark. In just a few chapters, and with the quick reference layout, you can begin capturing, filtering and troubleshooting network communications while being reminded of the fundamentals of protocols such as IP, TCP and UDP. If you know you are going to be doing a capture in the afternoon, this is a great book to reference in the morning as it is clear, concise and to the point. This is one book to keep on your desk.

Robert Shimonski may have several years of experience noodling around with networks... but he needs to take a remedial English class. I don't care where this chowderclown used to work or how many books he has written; the punctuation and grammatical errors contained in "The Wireshark Field Guide" (and I suspect his other books as well) are embarrassing. It's wearying to read. The dude needs to get a proofreader and a copy editor before he gets another book deal. It's hard to take someone's guidance seriously when they fail at simple, written communication.

I purchased The Wireshark Field Guide because we were experiencing slowness between an application server and a Citrix server that no one, not even vendor support was able to pinpoint. We tried packet capture, but the mountain of cryptic data that Wireshark generated only added to the confusion; even our network engineers were stumped. Robert Shimonski obviously speaks from real-world experience rather than by-the-book ideal practices laden with vendor jargon. In my case, I didn't have time to study long, expensive books or scour the Internet for answers (we did that already). The concise format of TWFG is perfect. In an hour, I was properly filtering results and personalizing the application to find underlying issues. After reading the entire book, I had a decent understanding of the underlying network communication and that's when the problem became apparent. Long story short, I found issue (SQL Reporting configuration) and added a very valuable tool to my repertoire.

I can't even give this a 2 star rating. I can honestly say that I didn't learn a thing from the book except for where to find the application menu options. The author goes into a "how to" in each chapter where he doesn't tell you anything you couldn't find from looking on the screen yourself... No dials, no scenario troubleshooting, nothing. Imagine a book about a can of soup, where they tell you "inside is food". That's it!

Wireshark is a robust tool with many features and options. However if you are not familiar with the tool it can be very overwhelming. Before reading this manual, I struggled with the tool. I found myself having to spend more time troubleshooting how to get the tool configured rather than troubleshooting network issues. As an infrastructure engineer having the right tools and know how to use them is key. This manual immediately got me going and set me up nice to harness the power of Wireshark.

This is a very handy guide to get you up and running using Wireshark. There's history on how the tool works as well troubleshooting tips and techniques. This is a great book for new network/systems engineers and for anyone interested in capturing and analysing data transactions. Some filtering options are also covered which is very important since capturing production data can produce very large capture files and increase your trouble shooting time. Great examples and great tips from real world experience....

Large amounts of net traffic is transferred vis https. There is no coverage of capturing SSL/TLS or https traffic even though this is a feature of Wireshark.

About time... a book based on real-world experience, quick read, simple to understand, Recommend for all system and network engineers out there!!!