Book / Literature Recommendations

Tue Sep 16 18:35:05 UTC 2014

On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 1:48 AM, James Bensley <jwbensley at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> What is the single best book you have read on networking? That's a
> wide topic so to clarify I'm talking about service provider networking
> but I do enjoy all aspects really and don't want to limit my self to
> one area of networking.
>
> I'm often reading technical books about technology X or protocol Y but
> they are generally explaining a new technology to me, how it works and
> how to use it (and how to configure it if its a book by a vendor like
> Juniper or Cisco). That is usually a learning exercise though required
> for an upcoming project or deliverable.
>
> I haven't read many vendor neutral books recently that explained
> concepts, or technologies, or paradigms that I found profound, radical
> and extremely useful.
>
> I feel like I'm just reading networking books these days to learn a
> new technology for a period of time (until a project completes) then
> moving on to the next technology (book). Longevity of the information
> doesn't seem as profound as it used to; BGP design principals will
> stay with me for decades until we reach the need for BGP v5 or
> similar, learning about 8b/10b encoding was interesting but not really
> required for my line of work more out of hobbyist interest and serves
> no practical purpose as a network engineer.
>
>
> Cheers,
> James.

I recommend reading the NANOG meeting materials archive presos and videos.

Good to see what people are actually doing, real lessons learned.

CB