Students and professionals, alike, will appreciate this book, as it is comprehensive and written and designed in a user friendly format. It features an extensive dictionary that allows for easy access to the terminologies surrounding SAN.There are other books that talk a lot about building infrastructure, but this one provides the most complete coverage of what is needed to use SANs to solve business IT problems. Although the book is quite terse on wires and protocols, I was pleased to see which business applications were sensible for use with SANs. Good information on benefits, killer applications, software architectures and requirements, implementation and management.I would also recommend "Blueprints for High Availability" by Evan Marcus (with Hal Stern)