As you may or may not know I'm finally losing my job in January (redundancy - I'm not getting sacked or anything ). I'm 'IT coordinator' where I work at the moment, meaning I'm local IT support (the person people ask so they don't have to call anyone out), but although I'm in charge of the hardware side of things, I've no network admin access, and aren't responsible for the software side of the network at all, and as such have limited experience in that kind of thing. I basically know how it works, but not to the extent that you could put me in charge of one and I could run it. This is a considerable hole that I could do with plugging, and its something I could teach myself fairly easily.

I know there's a few network admins on here - can you recommend any decent books I could get that would teach me a bit more about networking in an office environment?

Networking hardware and configuration is easy enough, the trick is to learn the server software and administration - the question then is what kind of server? Linux, Windows Server, Apple OSX Server? Web server, SOHO server, a Fiery/RIP print server?...

You'll learn more by setting up a server OS on a spare box at home rather than from a book. The doing is more important than the theory.