Rating: 

route-path return traffic was interesting and informative. However, the book

is unable to substain any high level of instruction. A few discussions in the book are confusing, and quite a bit of information is repeated too many times (better editing might have helped on these points). However, I'm not sure Tony had a target audience well thought out while writting this book. The small chapter on performance would definitely not be useful for an experienced network admin, and would be little help to someone just starting to work with server load balancers. More in-depth discussion of load balancing setups for particular protocols (POP, SMTP, HTTP, streaming, FTP, etc) would have been helpful. Real world examples, case studies, and "gotchas" about the major vendor's products would have all made this a more useful book. At least a chapter on open source solutions might have been helpful (example, using apache's mod_rewrite and mod_proxy to reverse-proxy CPU intensive parts of a web site to multiple back end machines, leaving the main server to handle basic web file serving).

Unlike the 20 or so O'Reilly titles on my shelf at work, this one will be staying home or returned to the bookstore.

-adam