Whether you're a network architect, engineer, operator/technician this book will provide valuable insight into BGP for your particular purpose. This book is mostly practical and doesn't delve much into the intricate details of BGP/distance-vector routing such as explanation of algorithms, but rather focuses on the setup, operation, and troubleshooting of BGP and related networking concepts.

The first four chapters briefly cover TCP/IP, routing protocols, IP addressing with respect to BGP, etc. I found the chapter on IP addressing most useful, since it's not quite clear how the allocations work with the various governing organizations (IANA, ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, etc.) that manage the IP address allocations and deal with the depletion of IP address space.

The meat of the book is in the chapters on configuring BGP and Traffic Engineer, both which were an excellent read. A lot of this book can be selectively read, since it can go into detail for large networks which also run an IGP protocol or use route reflectors, which is useful if you're considering extending your network especially in the case of multiple POPs.

The troubleshooting sections provides a mix of common BGP problems along with how to deal with support from various ISPs. There is also a section that explains with how to deal with other NOCs, which I believe is common sense, but needs explanation as many people seem to do the wrong thing and don't get anywhere.

I've had this book for several years now, and I often come back to it to refresh my understanding on certain aspects of BGP and routing. Lastly,
this book is very cisco-centric in configuration of BGP, however I found
the configs useful although I mainly work with Juniper or host-based
implementations of BGP that use different syntax and I had little problem
translating the configs.

Highly recommended and solid book for those that want to understand the practical use of BGP.

For the last year or two I have been searching for a book that would allow me to understand the fundamentals as well as the advanced concepts in BGP. For the last year or two I have grown frustrated with the books from Cisco Press - either the writing would just put your lights out or that there is overwhelming amount of information on packets that would distract if not deter you from trying to focus on learning the protocol. Then this book came along and the author has done an outstanding job in organizing and presenting the materials that would surely keep the junior to senior level network guys interested and best of all the author clearly knows how to explain the BGP concepts in an easier to understand manner. I highly recommend this book for junior to senior network guys who have the desire to learn BGP. Learning BGP has never been easier with this book.