A year ago I told myself I needed to start learning Junos.  While I did sign up for the Fast Track program and have spent a lot of time trying to get the basics of the JNCIA down, I still haven’t gotten around to taking the test.  In the meantime, I’ve had a lot more interaction with Juniper users and Juniper employees.  One of those was Doug Hanks.  I met him at Network Field Day 4 this year.  He told me about a book that he had recently authored that I might want to check out if I wanted to learn more about Junos and specifically the MX router platform.  Doug was kind enough to send me an autographed copy:

The covers on O’Reilly books are always the best.  It’s like a zoo with awesome content inside.

This is not a book for the beginner.  Frankly, most O’Reilly press books are written for people that have a good idea about what they’re doing.  If you want to get your feet wet with Junos, you probably need to look at the Day One guides that Juniper provides free of charge.  When you’ve gone through those and want to step up to a more in-depth volume you should pick up this book.  It’s the most extensive, exhaustive guide to a platform that I’ve ever seen in a very long time.  This isn’t just an overview of the MX or a simple configuration guide.  This book should be shipped with every MX router that leaves Sunnyvale.  This is a manual for the TRIO chipset and all the tricks you can do on it.

The MX Series book does a great job of not only explaining what makes the MX and TRIO chipset different, but also how to make it perform at the top of its game.  The chapter on Class of Service (CoS) alone is worth its weight in gold.  That topic has worried me in the past because of other vendor’s simplified command line interfaces for Quality of Service (QoS).  This book spells everything out in a nice orderly fashion and makes it all make more sense than I’ve seen before.  I’m pretty sure those pages are going to get reused a lot as I start my journey down the path of Junos.  But just because the book make things easy to understand doesn’t mean that it’s shallow on technical knowledge or depth.  The config snippet for DDoS mitigation is fifteen pages long!  That’s a lot of info that you aren’t going to find in a day one guide.  And all of those chapters are backed up with case studies.  It’s not enough that you know how to configure some obscure command.  Instead, you need to see where to use it and what context makes the most sense.  That’s where these things hit home for me.  I was always a fan of word problems in math.  Simple formulas didn’t really hit home for me.  I needed an example to reinforce the topic.  This book does an outstanding job of giving me those case studies.

Tom’s Take

The Juniper MX Series book is now my reference point for what an deep dive tome on a platform should look like.  It covers the technology to a very exhaustive depth without ever really getting bogged down in the details.  If you sit down and read this cover to cover, you will come away with a better understanding of the MX platform that anyone else on the planet except perhaps the developers.  That being said, don’t sit down and read it all at once.  Take the time to go into the case studies and implement them on your test lab to see how the various features interact together.  Use this book as an encyclopedia, not as a piece of fireside reading material.  You’ll thank yourself much later when you’re not having dreams of CoS policies and tri-color policers.

Disclaimer

This copy of Juniper MX Series was provided to me at no charge by Doug Hanks for the purpose of review.  I agreed with Doug to provide an unbiased review of his book based on my reading of it.  There was no consideration given to him on the basis of providing the book and he never asked for any when providing it.  The opinions and analysis provided in this review reflect my views and mine alone.