Everybody believes and says that books are your best friends and trust me, if you are on the path doing something or anything into solutions arena. Definitely books are going to be your best friend. In 10 years of my career, I got a chance to read around 700 books (See I have a good library) - Technology, Business case studies, my course books, Novels, Fiction whatever... and every time I finish a book, It definitely carries something worth learning.
While pursuing my solutions designing career, I got lucky to read plenty of books and today I am sharing the list of books which really added more than value to my knowledge and my life.
Top Down Network Design
I would call this book as a starter before your main course but this book has the capabilities to satisfy your hunger for the Network Designing knowhow. This books tells you everything about basic of network designing to advances of network designing, questions to be asked before designing a solutions, formats to record the answers, ways to perform your analysis and formats to record their answers to. I personally learnt solution designing from this book. This book will truly serve you as a "Swiss Army Knife"
Designing Cisco Network Service Architectures (ARCH)
If you are a Cisco fan boy/Girl and networking means Cisco to you. This could be a very good book for you. This provide with something of everything sort of information and this will also prepare you for the CCDP certification.
Optimum Routing Designs
I read a management book called “Good to Great by Jim Collins” and he said good is enemy of great. In the similar way Sub-Optimal is enemy of Optimal. Russ White had tried to put in everything, what he could to explain the working of all of the routing protocols, various use cases, there pros & cons and lot more. If you love playing with traffic and routing is your passion. Trust Me, This book is going to your new Bible.
Definitive MPLS Network Designs
Definitive MPLS Network Designs provides examples of how to combine key technologies at the heart of IP/MPLS networks. Techniques are presented through a set of comprehensive design studies. Each design study is based on characteristics and objectives common to a given profile of network operators having deployed MPLS and discusses all the corresponding design aspects. Following these are details of all aspects of the network design, covering VPN, QoS, TE, network recovery, and—where applicable—multicast, IPv6, and Pseudowire.
Routing TCP/IP Vol II (CCIE Professional Development)
This book has been around for years now and is an obvious first choice for anybody appearing for CCIE exams. This book is a very close competitor of “Optimum Routing Designs” but it focuses more on the working & behavior of protocols rather than their use cases. This book can turn you a hardliner.
Those who love BGP will love this book too. This provides you with the practical guidelines for designing and deploying a scalable BGP routing architecture. Starting with basics of BGP this book finishes up by closely looking at the more recent extensions to BGP through Multi-Protocol BGP for MPLS-VPN, IP Multicast, IPv6, and CLNS. Also this book had contributed in most of my articles on BGP.
This book has everything to get you thinking & talking about Availability, Uptime, IP SLA, Mission Critical Data, Quality of Service etc. Building Resilient IP Networks is relevant to both enterprise and service provider customers of all sizes. Regardless of whether the network connects to the Internet, fortifying IP networks for maximum uptime and prevention of attacks is mandatory for anyone’s business.
OSPF is technology suite in itself. I personally believe that OSPF is the most complex routing protocol I had ever studied but you don’t have worry because this book has the capabilities to simplify it for you. This book will make you understand how OSPF operates, how to configure and troubleshoot this important protocol, and most importantly how to design a network that uses OSPF.
Atom, L2TPv3, MPLS. LDP, ISP/CLEC, pseudowire etc. were the terms which use to scare me prior to reading this book. This book has enormous potential to simplify complex architectures and contains amazing case studies all Layer 2 technologies transported using AToM and L2TPv3 pseudowires, including Ethernet, Ethernet VLAN, HDLC, PPP, Frame Relay, ATM AAL5 and ATM cells, and advanced topics relevant to Layer 2 VPN deployment, such as QoS and scalability.
As the name suggests Advanced MPLS Design and Implementation is your guide to understanding, designing, and implementing MPLS VPNs, WAN-switched MPLS VPNs, MPLS traffic engineering, and MPLS QoS.
Few more recommended reads -
Apart from all these books, one should always use SRND guides & product specific solution guides provided by Cisco. These guides are really amazing and open your mind toward using the products in unexplored avenues.
Guys “sharing is caring”, Please do share the names of the books which helped you enhance your skills.