Network Programmability & Automation, 2nd Edition, Is Out There!

The second edition of Network Programmability and Automation is already out there!

As Jason and I announced more than one year ago in this blog, I had the honor to join the original authors (Scott Lowe and Matt Oswalt) to work on this new edition.

The goal of the book remains the same—to help network engineers who want to explore network automation and transform themselves with the skills that modern network engineering demands. Because of the broad concepts and technologies involved, this is not a simple goal. We did our best revising the first edition of the book by extending existing topics (for instance, covering classes, exceptions, and multi-threading in the Python chapter), and adding new ones, such as:

• Cloud: Cloud Networking, Containers, Kubernetes
• Network Development Environments: Text editors, development tools, and emulation tools (e.g., VirtualBox, Vagrant, Containerlab)
• Go programming language
• RESTCONF and gRPC/gNMI: new API interfaces with examples in Python and Go
• Nornir: a Python framework to orchestrate network operations, with examples with Napalm plugin
• Terraform: provisioning cloud networking resources as code
• Network Automation Architecture: a structured approach to building network automation solutions integrating complementary solutions

We also wanted to facilitate the reproducibility of the numerous code examples, so we have published a GitHub repository with the examples referenced in the book. And, due to book length constraints, we also had to relocate some content from the first edition into an extras website.

Personally, it has been an amazing opportunity to improve how to communicate technical concepts, and also being able to help all the network engineers like me who are looking forward to learning and getting better. We hope this book helps you get started on your network automation journey. Enjoy it!

-Christian

PS: You can find it at Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle format.