Book / Literature Recommendations

[jwbensley at gmail.com (James Bensley)]

Hi All,

What is the single best book you have read on networking? That's a
wide topic so to clarify I'm talking about service provider networking
but I do enjoy all aspects really and don't want to limit my self to
one area of networking.

I'm often reading technical books about technology X or protocol Y but
they are generally explaining a new technology to me, how it works and
how to use it (and how to configure it if its a book by a vendor like
Juniper or Cisco). That is usually a learning exercise though required
for an upcoming project or deliverable.

I haven't read many vendor neutral books recently that explained
concepts, or technologies, or paradigms that I found profound, radical
and extremely useful.

I feel like I'm just reading networking books these days to learn a
new technology for a period of time (until a project completes) then
moving on to the next technology (book). Longevity of the information
doesn't seem as profound as it used to; BGP design principals will
stay with me for decades until we reach the need for BGP v5 or
similar, learning about 8b/10b encoding was interesting but not really
required for my line of work more out of hobbyist interest and serves
no practical purpose as a network engineer.


Cheers,
James.