My guess is that Goncalves is a good researcher. Anyone who surfs the net for "IP Multicasting" can grab whitepapers, tutorials, presentations from the consortiums, forums (fora?) and vendors and write -- rather cut & paste, and "make" -- a book of the same caliber.
No comments on Niles. Her bio clearly explains her contribution to this book.
I was fooled by the title and the subtitles and bought both books at the same time. Same shock... twice. McGrawHill: fire the editor, say bye to Mr. Goncalves, and recall these books.
I cannot believe the 5* ratings, something conspicuous there. Only if you are an IP guru, you may enjoy the book -- patting yourselves on the back as you read the 1500 different topics associated (and sometimes not associated) with the topic and going "Yeah, I know this. I know this, too. And that, too. etc. etc."
Do not buy this book. You'll be better off reading the RFC's.
First off, this book should not be called IP Multicasting, but more an "intro to networking" because the author literally covers every possible avenue unrelated to IP Multicast he possibly can to create a larger book to sell for more money. He literally doesn't even talk about multicasting for the first 100+ pages. Actually if you took apart the chapters that had anything to do with Multicasting the book would be half the size. If you further removed the redundancy in his material where he repeats himself in different chapters, you would probably take off an additional 25 pages.
There is ZERO structure to this book. He jumps back and forth between topics chapter to chapter. It seems almost insane that he even had an editor, because the person obviously did not do anything to help organize the topics in the book. He literally repeats the same topics with almost identical verbage 1-2 chapters apart.
He BLATENTLY has wrong information all throughout the book. As I was reading the book, I was making stars next to the pages where he has wrong information. Rather than typing a 10 page review, suffice to say he is probably the worst author I've ever read. It was grueling to even get through the book with reading so much mis-information.
I simply wished that the people that reviewed this book would have honestly read the book, or have read any books in the area of multicasting/datacom, because anyone would give this book a horrible review.
AVOID AT ALL COSTS.