Book Image

Python Network Programming Techniques

By : Marcel Neidinger
Book Image

Python Network Programming Techniques

By: Marcel Neidinger

Overview of this book

Network automation offers a powerful new way of changing your infrastructure network. Gone are the days of manually logging on to different devices to type the same configuration commands over and over again. With this book, you'll find out how you can automate your network infrastructure using Python. You'll get started on your network automation journey with a hands-on introduction to the network programming basics to complement your infrastructure knowledge. You'll learn how to tackle different aspects of network automation using Python programming and a variety of open source libraries. In the book, you'll learn everything from templating, testing, and deploying your configuration on a device-by-device basis to using high-level REST APIs to manage your cloud-based infrastructure. Finally, you'll see how to automate network security with Cisco’s Firepower APIs. By the end of this Python network programming book, you'll have not only gained a holistic overview of the different methods to automate the configuration and maintenance of network devices, but also learned how to automate simple to complex networking tasks and overcome common network programming challenges.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Chapter 1: A Primer on Python 3

Since its development in the early 1990s, Python has become one of the most widely used programming languages in the world. Its easy-to-use yet powerful syntax and cross-platform availability, combined with a rich ecosystem of pre-built functionality, have turned it into one of the most widely used languages in the realm of infrastructure automation. From simple automation scripts to complex web applications, Python can handle a wide variety of tasks.

In this chapter, we are going to review some basic concepts of the Python programming language before using these skills in the following chapters to automate our infrastructure.

While not being a full introduction to the Python language, this chapter should serve as a refresher for the concepts we are going to use in the automation script in later chapters. If you are already proficient with Python, you can skip ahead to the next chapter.

Specifically, you will learn about the following concepts...