Title Configuring Citrix MetaFrame for Windows 2000 Terminal Services Authors Paul Stansel, Travis Gunn, Kris Kistler, Melissa Craft (Editor) and others Publisher Syngress Publication Date November 2000 ISBN 1-928994-18-0 Price $49.95 (U.S.) Pros Great breath and depth of coverage. Cons Weakly edited. Verdict Recommended

A one-sentence description of this book would describe it as a "Citrix How-To." A How-To in the Linux / Unix world is a document that contains all you need to implement and administer a certain aspect of the operating system. The How-To is generally owned by one editor, but may be written by several authors. If all goes well, it is regularly updated and supported by its authors.

Syngress has adapted this model to develop its Syngress Solutions series, and it works well in book format. This book is a rich source of information for system engineers and administrators who are working with Citrix. The format also comes with a "vendor product upgrade," supported via the www.syngress.com Web site. (Click on members and sign up! I had problems getting past the introductory screens, so I can’t tell you how good the Web support is.)

This guide is great addition to the administration manuals you will get with the product, and contains the right amount of detail on how the solution works at a somewhat more theoretical level. This allows you to size a server for multiple users (determine its processor speed, RAM and disk space) for both Terminal Server and MetaFrame.

It also contains a discussion on the configuration of the server (including some registry hacks) and deployment of the clients. For Citrix, the ICA client exists on multiple platforms, and I was pleasantly surprised to see a discussion on client installation on Unix as well.

For me, the biggest drawback of this book is that it sometimes contains too much of the "step-by-step" stuff. I generally pick this up from the documentation that came with the product, and use books to fill in the technical blanks left by the product documentation. I also have some minor problems with the way this book is edited. It is written by many authors, and would have profited from a stricter editorial hand. For instance, the chapters on implementing Terminal Server (Chapter 3) and Implementing Citrix (Chapter 4) have a similar structure, but it's clear from the text that the authors had a different way of dealing with this structure. As a result, the section on "sizing," for instance, contains detailed formulas for the Citrix Server sizing, and only some much more general comments for the Terminal Services counterpart. It would have been quite interesting to see a comparison with some developed examples here.

This is annoying rather than a real drawback, though, and I can recommend this book to anyone who uses MetaFrame on a regular basis. The book is well-balanced and provides a combination of depth and scope that makes it very suitable to Citrix engineers and administrators.

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