To get the most out of this book

To get the most out of this book, some basic hands-on network operation knowledge and Python knowledge is recommended. Most of the chapters can be read in any order, except for Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, which introduce base technologies that will be used later in the book. Besides the basic software and hardware tools introduced at the beginning of the book, new tools relevant to each of the chapters will be introduced in the respective chapters.

It is highly recommended to follow and practice the examples shown in your network lab.

Download the example code files

The code bundle for the book is hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-Python-Networking-Fourth-Edition. We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://packt.link/D2Ttl.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. For example: “The auto-config also generated vty access for both Telnet and SSH.”

A block of code is set as follows:

# This is a comment
print("hello world")

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ python3
Python 3.10.6 (main, Nov  2 2022, 18:53:38) [GCC 11.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on the screen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. For example: “ In the coming section, we will continue with the SNMP theme of network monitoring but with a fully featured network monitoring system called Cacti.”