Internet Routing Architectures

If you are looking for a book describing all the things which need to be taken care of when planning and implementing BGP then you will appreciate this book.Mr Halabi provides a lot of example set-ups which are, for the people working in the Internet networking industry, very familiar. The examples range from a typical customer who wants BGP connectivity to multi-customer and international backbone configurations.Aside from the many examples, which serve the text well in getting the material understood, Mr Halabi takes care to describe the fundamentals associated with it as well.However, this is not a book for the faint at heart. Prior knowledge of IP and routing will be useful in order to appreciate this book.Of course, this books focuses on the Cisco IOS architecture syntax, but the explanations and details will suit anyone willing to learn in-depth about BGP.The other bible is [Juniper's] John W. Stewart's book: BGP4 Inter-Domain Routing in the Internet. Also a must-read. Having both books will tell you everything you need.

I am the architect of a leading MPLS VPN service which uses BGPv4 with MPLS extensions. I constantly refer back to this book for standard BGP scenarios (it has no MPLS VPN info). I have recommended this book to all our techincal support people and our customers for designing BGP peering networks.The book is well written, well organized and easy to follow. It has great breath of BGP applications. It is a tremendous help for those designing AS peering networks. It gives a brief overview of internet routing then dives into BGP. After the BGP protocol description, the next part of the book has applications geared around scenarios/case studies. The last part is specific Cisco IOS configurations for the scenarios in the previous part. The scenarios cover, to list a few: load balancing, preference routing (primary/backup), route redistribution, default routes, route summarization, route reflectors and confederations (scaling), damping (stability), policy control (filtering/manipulating routes, attributes and community values).Note that it is not a BGP specification nor a Cisco IOS reference. A better title would be "BGP Applications".

Halabi's book is the BGP equivalent of Doyle's "Routing TCP/IP, Vol. 1". Without reading this book, I never would have understood BGP and the implications of interdomain routing. I also recommend Radia Perlman's "Interconnections, 2nd Ed."

The book was very easy to read for a networking literate individual. The book builds up to advanced topics and walks you through sample configurations. I now feel confident about my knowledge of BGP.

This is, without a doubt, *the* definitive routing reference for the network engineer; and one of the best technical books I have ever read. I usually skip to the back and pick out the parts that interest me; I'm reading this from start to finish, it's that well written. If you need to integrate your LAN with the internet, or if you are a network consultant or ISP tech like me, you need this book. This is required reading.<P