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Book offers network tips Free seminar set for Saturday at Barnes and Noble By DAVID PRESZLER In nearly two decades of working as a high-tech engineer, Priscilla Oppenheimer has seen her share of computer networks. Unfortunately, many of them have resembled poorly planned gardens -- growing every which way as the technology and network needs change and expand. "I started to realize that a lot of people are designing networks haphazardly," the Ashland woman says. "I decided they could use a system." She outlines that system in her new book, "Top-Down Network Design: A Systems Analysis Approach to Enterprise Network Design" (Macmillan, $55). Oppenheimer will hold a free seminar and book signing at 2 p.m. Saturday at Barnes & Noble Booksellers, 1400 Biddle Road, Medford. The 560-page book was released in January as part of the Cisco Press Design and Implementation Series. Several reviews posted online praise for the work and Oppenheimer says about 1,500 copies have been sold. The book is Oppenheimer's first and she says it took her eight or nine months of full-time work to complete. Cisco Systems, where Oppenheimer worked for more than two years, agreed to publish it as part of its series before she began the project. Oppenheimer has done a lot of troubleshooting work on networks and she says the biggest mistake many novice designers make is not analyzing business requirements thoroughly before beginning. "It a lot of cases they don't really analyze the most important applications," she says. "Analyzing business goals is very important." The book is intended to provide readers with tested processes and tools to help understand traffic flow, protocol behavior and internetworking technologies. Oppenheimer was a technical program systems engineer for Cisco Systems from June 1995 to January 1998, telecommuting from Ashland. Since leaving Cisco, she's been an independent networking consultant teaching classes on networking and related fields in cities across the country. She moved to Ashland in November 1994 with her husband Alan, who runs Open Door Networks. When she moved to the Rogue Valley, she was telecommuting for Network General Corporation, where she was a training manager and senior instructor. She's also worked for Apple Computer for seven years as a senior support engineer and software engineer. Today's Business Index Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA