Network Programmability and Automation Book, 2nd Edition

Exciting news, the 2nd Edition of Network Programmability and Automation book by O'Reilly is already available !

I can't start this post without thanking Jason Edelman for bringing me into this project (together with Matthew Oswalt and Scott Lowe ) and giving me the opportunity to contribute to this new edition of the book (the pioneer of books around network automation).

Since 2017 (first edition), many things have changed in the network automation realm, so we decided to work on this second edition to update previous content and add new topics that were not covered in the first one.

The goal is still the same: to give network engineers the foundations to embrace their transformation into automation operations and infrastructure as code. This is an ambitious goal because it requires finding the right balance between which topics to cover, how deep to go, and the extension of the book. We hope the final result matches the readers' expectations, and provides the knowledge to get them started in automation with a path to extend their skills.

What's new?

The second edition comes with four key points:

• New topics: We have added a few new chapters and some new sections in already existing chapters. Check them in the next section.
• Refresh of previous topics: All the chapters have been reviewed, updated, and extended with new sections (for instance, the Python chapter now covers the classes, exceptions, and multi-threading or Protobuf has been added in the Data Formats chapter).
• Examples in a repository : We have created a Git repository with the book code snippets to allow better reproducibility.
• Extra content into a webpage: The book length is finite, and to grant a good content balance, we have decided to move some content from the first edition as extra online content. This includes some Linux networking topics, the culture chapter, and Salt and Stackstorm tools.

New Topics

• 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.

All these changes, the review of existing chapters, and new topics bring 43% more content (without considering the extra content moved to the support website).

Hopefully, you get excited about the new edition and enjoy it. We are open to any suggestions or questions coming from our readers!

Thanks for your attention!

Christian