Network Programmability and Automation: Skills for the Next-Generation Network Engineer, 2nd Edition

What This Book Covers

As its title indicates, this book is focused on network programmability and automation. At its core, network programmability and automation is about simplifying the tasks involved in configuring, managing, and operating network equipment, network topologies, network services, and network connectivity.

Many, many components are involved—including operating systems that are now seeing far broader use in networking than in the past, new methodologies like continuous integration, and tools that formerly might have fallen only in the realm of the system administrator (tools like source code control and configuration management systems). Because all of these play a part in the core definition of network programmability and automation, we cover all these topics. Our goal for this book is to enable you to establish a foundation of knowledge around network programmability and automation.

How This Book Is Organized

This book isn’t necessarily intended to be read from start to end; instead, we’ve broken up the topics so that you can easily find the content that most interests you. You may find it useful to start out sequentially reading the first three chapters, as they provide background information and set the stage for the rest of the book. From there, you’re welcome to jump to whatever topics are most useful or interesting to you.

We’ve tried to keep the chapters relatively standalone, but—as with any technology—that’s not always possible. Wherever we can, we provide cross-references to help you find the information you need.