This page has a set of books, papers and tutorials that the Ops & Management ADs happened to find interesting and figured that you might too. Some of this is for newcomers, but also to help long term participants learn more, and also quickly get spun up on a new topic / protocol.
We've mostly tried to focus on resources which are approachable and good introductions to a topic -- once you are deep into protocol / topic X, presumably you can find other books on the topic.
If you have a recommendation for a book / resource that you'd like added to this list, please just add it ('tis a wiki after all!), or just email one of us. Ideally this would include the name of the book / tutorial / document / whatever, as well as a way to find it, and a short summary.
While not an Ops specific document, if you are new to the IETF, the most important thing to read is The Tao of the IETF.
The introduction for the early versions of the Tao contained:
The purpose of this For Your Information (FYI) RFC is to explain to the newcomers how the IETF works. This will give them a warm, fuzzy feeling and enable them to make the meeting more productive for everyone. This FYI will also provide the mundane bits of information which everyone who attends an IETF meeting should know.
While the document has changed over time, the spirit is the same. If you only read one thing, this should be it...
The NSRC tutorials are always great, and the BGP one is a good and very friendly introduction.
The Technology Deep Dives goal is to provide insight into technologies which span multiple areas and to provide a focused exploration of a technology. It primarily designed to share information rather than to share problems.
They are "in depth" tutorials / presentations and discussions on a specific topic / focus area.
These is a YouTube playlist of them here, and specific links:
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the primary routing protocol used to transfer data and information on the Internet or autonomous systems. BGP is a Path Vector Protocol which maintains paths to different hosts, networks and gateway routers and determines the routing decision based on rules, filtering, weight and community.
Link: BGP for All
Previously, when I hired relatively newcomers to network operations, I'd always buy them two books:
BGP4: Inter-Domain Routing in the Internet: Inter-Domain Routing in the Internet" by John W. Stewart
Internet Routing Architectures by Sam Halabi
BGP4 is a short, but still very approachable introduction to actually running BGP on the Internet. If you just got tossed in the deep end and need to make BGP work tomorrow, this is the book for you.
"Internet Routing Architectures" is a classic - it mainly focuses on BGP, but is a very good introduction / way to get started.
This book is written by our own Benoit Claise (ex Management AD), Joe Clarke (OpsAWG chair) and Jan Lindblad. It is a good, and friendly introduction to YANG / network automation.
This collected from a NANOG thread:
(https://www.inspire.edu.gr/wp-content/pdfs/artemis_TON2018.pdf)
- Securing BGP - A Literature Survey
(https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5473881)
- Stable Internet routing without global coordination
(https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/974523)
- A Survey on Approaches to Reduce BGP Interdomain Routing Convergence
Delay on the Internet (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7964680)
The content of this page was last updated on 2022-02-08. It was migrated from the old Trac wiki on 2022-12-19.