Ping!

I like customer reviews on Amazon.com.
My favorite tech authority, Leo Laporte, says it's the best way to get good information about a product you're thinking of buying and I agree. I've written a bunch of reviews on Amazon.com as well, sometimes wondering why anyone would care about what I think of a book or a movie or a gadget, but what the hell - sometimes you just gotta speak/write your mind.
One of the most brilliant customer reviews I've ever read anywhere was written by John E. Fracisco about my favorite childhood book - "The Story about Ping."
I remember badgering my mother to get it for me from the public library on several occasions and I loved having it read to me. In fact, I just ordered a copy for my granddaughter Lisa - along with another book - as a belated birthday gift.
Anyhow, Fracisco recognized the parallels between the adventures of the little duck in the story and a Unix networking utility called Ping. If you're a computer geek and can read this review without laughing out loud, you need to have your sense of humor checked.



Ping! I love that duck!, January 26, 2000
By John E. Fracisco (El Segundo, CA USA)
This review is from: The Story about Ping (Hardcover)

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.

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.