I recently had to learn BGP in order to fully understand what I was doing when migrating from our Linux based Zebra routers (crappy and unstable) to our nice shiny new Juniper routers.
We had a couple of books at work, but by far the best was BGP: Building Reliable Networks with the Border Gateway Protocol. It hasn’t changed much since it was released in 2003, but neither has BGP so that really isn’t an issue, and with the recent BGP issues that keep occuring, a good knowledge of it is pretty important to any network admins out there, especially those like me with their own AS numbers!
The book is full of real world examples and was all I needed to use in my migration.
The book is a bit of a bore to read though, it’s not a comic, or a fun adventure book with a twist at the end. It’s a solid information transmission system which will inject in to your brain how the many networks that make up the Internet actually talk to each other and how traffic flows between them, which is exactly what I wanted and why I give it a solid 8/10.
The latest update, now just called BGP, is a must have if you want to start running the border gateway protocol and start broadcasting your own address range. You don’t accidentally want to knock Youtube of the Internet like China did.. do you?