Cisco Networking

The book I read to research this post was Cisco Networking All in One for Dummies by Edward Tetz which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Cisco have 4 major class of networking product. There's enterprise class which is for large networks & the increased capabilities of these products is reflected in the price. Incidently  Cisco holds the world record for having the most powerful router in the world. Then there are small medium business products these are obviously for smaller networks & they carry the Cisco name. Then there are Linksys small medium business products, these are cheaper but that is reflected in the capabilities & quality. Linksys was purchased by Cisco a while ago & made lower end networking equipment, eventually these will carry the Cisco badge but in the meantime they are branded Linksys. Then come the home products which are the cheapest, they also carry the Linksys brand name. A lot of the higher end products need Cisco iOS which is a brand specific operating system. Two programs often used for identifying what is on a Cisco network are Cisco Works which is a $10,000 for upto 300 workstations program & the free & easier to use Cisco Web Console. A free program often used for mapping networks is Nmap & its windows version Zenmap. When they're administrating a wireless network a lot of administrators use wireshark which analyzes information packets.