Book Club

The two other primary BGP popular references, John Stewart's _BGP 4: Inter-Domain Routing in the Internet_ and Sam Halabi's _Internet Routing Architectures_, are also excellent texts but they are also more dated than Beijnum's text. Stewart, the Juniper guru, gives you a short, excellent introduction into the theory behind BGP and the primary features of version 4. Stewart's was the first BGP book I read because it is so compact and clear (and for less $20 you can not beat the price). However, Stewart does not provide you practical, command line examples. Halabi is on the other extreme. Halabi gives you the basic theory but he also assumes that you have a set of Cisco routers in front of you to play with. Having only read Halabi's first edition, I would expect some improvement in the second edition but no real change in the Cisco-centric aspect.

Beijnum, gives you a middle approach between Stewart and Halabi. Yes, in Beijnum the command line examples are all Cisco but he presents the material such that you could easily use his text alongside any other vendor's manual to get the same value. Halabi is more cumbersome in that respect. Beijnum includes an introduction to Cisco router command line interface as an appendix. In many ways, you could probably practice Beijnum's examples with just a Quagga/Zebra routing daemon on a Linux system to avoid having to secure a Cisco router for the task.

Beijnum gives more background information than does Stewart's shorter text, with a more complete view of how to do network design and troubleshooting WAN connectivity. Beijnum assumes you know less than Halabi assumes you do, which makes Beijnum more accessible to someone new to BGP. A real plus for Beijnum is the wonderfully succint appendix on binary logic, netmasks, and prefixes (I always forget those subnet masks). All three texts assume you know the basics of routing and some interior routing protocol such as OSPF for the most benefit.

The only thing missing in Beijnum is that I was hoping for more of a "cookbook" approach to various BGP multihoming strategies. Halabi is better in this area with his extensive Cisco diagrams and configurations. Beijnum makes the subject easier to grasp, but since BGP can be such a complicated beast, I'll probably find myself pouring back over all of these books to make sure I understand it clearly.

Review by: Clarke Morledge
October 22, 2004