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Rating: 
Summary: Good overview (1st edition)
Review: After a brief review of the history and evolution of the Internet, the author motivates the rest of the book by giving a set of questions to be asked by an organization who intends to connect to the Internet. Since at this time all businesses it seems want to do this, the answering of these questions will give them more helpful information on just what must be considered when choosing an ISP. The details of the routing architecture are of course the main emphasis in the book. Some of the more important topics addressed in the book are: 1. IP subnetting and variable-length subnet masks and why they are useful. 2. The different strategies used to handle IP address space depletion, such as creative IP address allocation, classless interdomain routing (CIDR), private IP addressing, and the new IP version 6. In the discussion on CIDR, the author asserts the advantages of using aggregation, in that an Internet Service Provider can advertise one IP network rather than several individual advertisements. This, he says, results in more efficient routing strategies and propgation along with making the route advertisements more stable. The degree of the resulting efficiency is not really quantified by the author however. It would have been interesting to have real-life examples of the resulting gains, or examples taken from simulation modeling. Although such data might seem unnecessary now, since CIDR was proposed as a fix to the depletion problem, it would still be interesting to be able to understand in more detail the advantages of employing CIDR, and with comparing it the planned deployment of IPv6. 3. The discussion of distance vector routing and link-state routing and the advantages and disadvantages between the two. The reader interested in a more rigorous and quantitative comparision between the two routing protocols will not find it here, but such a comparison can be done via simulation modeling. 4. The representation of the BGP neighbor negotiation via a finite state machine. 5. The discussion of the TCP MD5 Signature Option, and its role in protecting BGP from spoofed TCP segments and TCP resets. 6. The building of peer sessions using BGP and how to implement it "internally" in an 'autonomous system.' Peer connections between routers in different autonomous systems are then "external" implementations of BGP. The autonomous systems as explained by the author can be used for example by two users who desire to have a link between them in case of a failure of their ISP. 7. The discussion on route instability and how to control it using aggregation, route dampening, and static route injection. The author spends an entire chapter in fact on the design of stable internets, although the discussion is brief and purely descriptive. The route dampening mechanism is discussed as a tool for controlling route instability. This involves a strategy for penalizing unstable routes and is implemented on CISCO routers (the author gives the commands for doing so explicitly). Although the author does not discuss any, modeling and empirical studies have indicated that a cavalier use of route dampening can be deleterious to a network. For example, it was shown early on in the use of BGP that a single route withdrawal may cause other routers to explore a sequence of alternative paths before deciding that the destination is unreachable. Some researchers have shown that this in turn causes "secondary flaps" which can suppress the threshold of the route flap damping algorithm, and resulting in delayed convergence of the route.
Rating: 
Summary: The undisputed guide for BGP!
Review: Don't be taken by the size of the book - it's packed with information on BGP-run infrastructures. From basic BGP applications, to case-scenario aggregations and confederations (even a complete list of CLI commands), simply the best text on the subject!
Rating:
Summary: another must read of network engineers
Review: Halabi had no doubt raised the bar for the books to come on internet architecture and so far no one has come close with a book like this. Written by the best in the business today. I picked it up basically for BGP and it covers all the details of BGP with real world applications. Icky topics like Synchronization, IGP-BGP interaction etc are explained with amazing clarity with diagrams and later on in chapter 10-11 you can see the actual IOS config. I learned a lot from Tuning BGP capabilities chapter which also covers route filtering and route-maps. Apart from BGP, the entire book is full of useful information. If you have a job in which you have to deal with routing protocols, be it design, implementation, testing, administration you ought to read this book, if nothing else, just for the heck of it.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for BGP routing architectures
Review: I am the architect of a leading MPLS VPN service which uses BGPv4 with MPLS extensions. I constantly refer back to this book for standard BGP scenarios (it has no MPLS VPN info). I have recommended this book to all our techincal support people and our customers for designing BGP peering networks. The book is well written, well organized and easy to follow. It has great breath of BGP applications. It is a tremendous help for those designing AS peering networks. It gives a brief overview of internet routing then dives into BGP. After the BGP protocol description, the next part of the book has applications geared around scenarios/case studies. The last part is specific Cisco IOS configurations for the scenarios in the previous part. The scenarios cover, to list a few: load balancing, preference routing (primary/backup), route redistribution, default routes, route summarization, route reflectors and confederations (scaling), damping (stability), policy control (filtering/manipulating routes, attributes and community values). Note that it is not a BGP specification nor a Cisco IOS reference. A better title would be "BGP Applications".
Rating:
Summary: Probably the best BGP book
Review: I've read both editions of Halabi's book cover-to-cover and I was stunned to discover just how widely they expanded the excellent original material. Though the configuration examples are IOS-centric, you will have absolute mastery of BGP routing and its various topologies by the time you finish this book. You'll learn the particulars of redundancy and load balancing, with plenty of concrete examples that you can apply directly in your own networks (I did), how to configure Multihop and when you may need to do so, how to set up multihoming in all its permutations, filtering and route maps, and much much more, in just about every possible deployment. Among the advanced topics, you'll understand how confederations and route reflection work, and how confederations help consolidate large BGP topologies into more manageable units - and also their limitations. It's basically impossible for me to lay out every topic that is effectively discussed in this book. If I had to choose one book for core networking topics, this would probably be the one.
Rating:
Summary: One of the two BGP bibles
Review: If you are looking for a book describing all the things which need to be taken care of when planning and implementing BGP then you will appreciate this book.
Mr Halabi provides a lot of example set-ups which are, for the people working in the Internet networking industry, very familiar. The examples range from a typical customer who wants BGP connectivity to multi-customer and international backbone configurations.
Aside from the many examples, which serve the text well in getting the material understood, Mr Halabi takes care to describe the fundamentals associated with it as well.
However, this is not a book for the faint at heart. Prior knowledge of IP and routing will be useful in order to appreciate this book.
Of course, this books focuses on the Cisco IOS architecture syntax, but the explanations and details will suit anyone willing to learn in-depth about BGP.
The other bible is [Juniper's] John W. Stewart's book: BGP4 Inter-Domain Routing in the Internet. Also a must-read. Having both books will tell you everything you need.
Rating:
Summary: good for cisco specific view of bgp, but lacking in places
Review: mr halabi knows his material and has an easy-to-follow writing
style. however, this book does an inadequate job of providing
complete examples (especially community usage), which when
learning something as complex as bgp, are essential.
overall, it is a great book and i recommend it to experienced as
well as novice engineers, if for no other reason than the
discussion of some of the politics and history of internetwork
engineering (as well as some of the organizations/groups which exist)
this book will teach you cisco's version of bgp - but when you
have cisco's marketshare, why not... you should alse read the
rfcs for bgp. before you think about trying to set-up bgp read
this, but also do some searching on the web for other resources
(the multihoming faq is very useful)
Rating:
Summary: TO BUY
Review: Only a word, Buy IT!
If you want to know how internet works and how works on cisco router, You Must Buy IT.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing book
Review: Still one of the greatest books on Internet Routing. Not a reference or manual of any kind. Not for someone who is looking to understand how to configure a cisco for a simple WAN or internal network. This book really emphasizes routing algorithms and in particular BGP.
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