I came across Mastering Python Networking by Eric Chou about a month ago on Twitter and immediately purchased it. I was excited to see book on programming targeted at people with a networking background as being able to automate becomes critical to scaling networks and reducing toil.
To say I’m a fan of this book is an understatement! I’d been expecting topics like programming with pexpect and using common APIs, but what we got was far more detailed than I could have hoped for with deep insights into the background of TCP right through building custom APIs, observability, and automating cloud networking.
Chou ramps the topics up gradually building on each chapter so that the learning curve for each topic is gentle enough that even someone with no Python experience could be writing basic scripts to automate network configuration changes within the first couple of chapters.
Using Ansible was covered in detail to automate configuration baselining, provisioning, and changes using a scalable methodology has been well received not only by me, but also raved about on Twitter. If you’re not using Ansible (or similar) you will eventually come across it this book gives you ready to run playbooks that will accelerate your adoption.
With my background in Observability I was pleasantly surprised that 2.5 chapters had been dedicated to the topic from multiple perspectives:
- Telemetry configuration pushes
- Receiving and decoding the telemetry
- Extending existing tools like NTOP and Cacti
Graphing and visualisation are an important part of making data consumable to multiple audiences and an introduction and practical examples of the popular MatPlotLib and PyGraphViz were on point.
Packet decoding and crafting libraries like Scapy are introduced and again the practical examples make it easy to digest relatively complex concepts like writing a network scanning tool relatively easy. I’ve used Scapy in the past to build custom protocol implementations, and I wish I’d had this book then.
Today most of my research centres around using a Python framework called Mininet, and while Mininet is not covered, I would recommend this book to anyone looking to learn modelling and simulations using Python.
The future of networking is not Network Engineers logging into individual devices and running commands. This book is a primer for the network engineering community looking to scale, and conversely for programmers looking to understand how to automate networking tasks.
Topics:
- Review of TCP/IP Protocol Suite and Python
- Low-Level Network Device Interactions
- APIs and Intent-Driven Networking
- The Python Automation Framework – Ansible
- Docker Containers for Network Engineers
- Network Security with Python
- Network Monitoring with Python – Part 1
- Network Monitoring with Python – Part 2
- Building Network Web Services with Python
- Introduction to AsyncIO
- AWS Cloud Networking
- Azure Cloud Networking
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