Books

In early 2021, Cisco Press released the first book authored by Networks Reimagined founder Ammar Ahmadi.

His book, CCNP Data Center Application Centric Infrastructure 300-620 DCACI Official Cert Guide, has been very well received within the community and enjoys high customer ratings on Amazon and all outlets where it is sold. We believe that this is partly because it is the most practical book written on the subject of Cisco Application Centric Infrustructure (ACI) to date. 

To ensure that the content was perfectly easy to digest for engineers new to ACI, Ammar re-wrote quite a few of the chapters before it ever went to print. And, he did so multiple times. A key criteria he had when writing the book was that it had to be as easy to read as a newspaper or magazine. It also had to avoid ambiguous language that could be interpreted in ten different ways.

Several months after the book was published, Pearson and Cisco Press released a self-paced video training course titled CCNP Data Center Application Centric Infrastructure 300-620 DCACI Complete Video Course. Ammar was the instructor. This course complements the book and delivers ACI content in the same simple language as the book. 

Since then, we have received a lot of positive feedback around both products directly from engineers who had used the book to learn ACI, deploy ACI, or support ACI in their networks for the first time.

To those of you who have benefited from these products and have put in the effort to send us your thoughts, we say thank you!

However, the feedback that has motivated us to change strategy from books and collaborations with vendors to independent product development was primarily the negative feedback. In particular, many engineers have shared frustration over the state of the industry as a whole, pointing to the cost of lab hardware for ACI as a significant barrier to learning ACI and developing advanced skills.

Another primary concern engineers have shared with us revolves around the lack of automation-oriented content in the aforementioned book and video course. Since these products were created to prepare candidates for a specific certification, the lack of content around automation was due to automation having been stripped from the associated exam topics.

Nonetheless, addressing these concerns is at the heart of our current strategy. Although we still firmly believe that the DCACI book and video course are the best self-paced entry-level products for engineers trying to learn ACI, we have created a roadmap that includes the release of affordable and highly flexible rack rentals and additional self-paced video courses. These courses will provide in-depth coverage of advanced software-defined networking (SDN) topics, including data center network automation.

Mentorship you can receive through our online community platform will also further complement these planned products.

Although Ammar does plan to write more books on topics involving SDN in the future, he has no immediate plans to do so. Instead, he will be using his spare time throughout 2022 and 2023 to develop educational tools, courses, and products for our website and to engage directly with as many of you as he can on our SDN community platform.