Before you buy a network automation book, decide what you are actually committing to, because the books split along that line. Some teach a language (Python or Go), some teach a tool stack (Ansible, Nautobot), and one teaches an operating model (NetDevOps pipelines). Buy from the wrong shelf and you end up with 800 pages that answer a question you were not asking.
The shelf also moved recently, and most reading lists have not caught up. Network Automation Cookbook got a full second edition in August 2025, the newest book in the field, while plenty of “best network automation books” round-ups still link the 2020 first edition and Eric Chou’s superseded third edition. We checked every pick below against its publisher’s catalog in August 2026, so the editions, page counts, and links here are the current ones.
Six books made the cut. Here is the whole shortlist before the detail:
| Book | Published | Pages | Stack | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Network Programmability and Automation, 2nd Ed | 2023 | 825 | Linux, Python, Go, APIs, Git | The foundation everything else assumes |
| Mastering Python Networking, 4th Ed | Jan 2023 | 594 | Python | Scripts working this month |
| Network Automation Cookbook, 2nd Ed | Aug 2025 | 566 | Ansible, Terraform, Nautobot | Ansible shops, newest book here |
| Network Automation with Nautobot | May 2024 | 816 | Nautobot source of truth | Teams past the script stage |
| Automating and Orchestrating Networks with NetDevOps | Jun 2023 | 320 | Pipelines, CI/CD | The operating model, shortest read |
| Network Automation with Go | Jan 2023 | 442 | Go | Telemetry and tooling builders |
How this list was put together
Every pick was verified against publisher and retailer listings this month: edition, publication date, page count, and whether a newer edition is announced. None of the six has a replacement on the way, which matters, because two of the books people still recommend most often (Mastering Python Networking 3rd edition and the Cookbook’s 2020 first edition) are superseded and should not be bought new. We also dropped the once-standard older titles: Automate Your Network dates to 2019, and Cisco Press’s own Network Automation Made Easy overlaps its newer NetDevOps title at less depth. What survives is the shelf a network engineer starting automation in 2026 would actually build.
1. Network Programmability and Automation, 2nd Edition
The field has a canon and this is it. Matt Oswalt, Christian Adell, Scott Lowe, and Jason Edelman rebuilt the 2018 original into an 825-page second edition, published by O’Reilly in 2023, and the subtitle says exactly what it is: skills for the next-generation network engineer. It teaches the substrate under every automation tool, which means Linux, Python, Go (new in this edition), APIs, data formats, and Git, then closes with a reference automation architecture chapter that is worth the price on its own if you are the person designing your team’s approach.
The trade-off is pace. This is a textbook, not a quick win, and readers who need a working playbook by Friday will find it frustrating. In practice this means you read it alongside one of the tool books below, not instead of them. It is also skills-first rather than vendor-first, so nothing in it rots when your shop swaps EOS for NX-OS.
Skip it if you already live in Python and Git daily and just need network-specific patterns; you would be paying for 300 pages you have internalized. Everyone else starts here. The print usually sits in the $50 to $80 range; check the live price on Amazon.
2. Mastering Python Networking, 4th Edition
Eric Chou’s book is the fastest route from “I configure routers over SSH” to “a script does that now”. The fourth edition (Packt, January 2023, 594 pages) works lab by lab through Netmiko, Ansible, Nornir, and the cloud and monitoring layers around them, with new chapters on Docker and AsyncIO that the third edition never had. Chou writes like an engineer who has run large production networks, because he has, and the labs reflect problems that actually come up.
Watch the edition when you buy. The 2020 third edition is still widely listed and still linked from older round-ups, and its library versions have drifted far enough from current Python tooling to cause real friction. If the cover does not say Fourth Edition, it is the old book.
Who it suits: the CLI-fluent engineer who wants running code this month and prefers reading Python to reading YAML. Skip it if your team has standardized on playbooks and nobody will maintain custom scripts; the Ansible route gets that shop further, faster. Expect roughly $40 to $55 in print; check the live price on Amazon.
3. Network Automation Cookbook, 2nd Edition
The newest book on this list, and the reason the list needed rewriting. Packt shipped the second edition in August 2025 with Christian Adell and Jeffrey Kala joining original author Karim Okasha, and it grew well past its Ansible roots: the 566 pages now cover 100+ recipes that pull in Terraform for cloud networking, Nautobot as a data source, and event-driven workflows of the kind we covered in the Event-Driven Ansible walkthrough.
A cookbook is a format choice with a real cost: recipes tell you how, rarely why. If you cannot already explain what a playbook run does to a device, the recipes will work and teach you little. The right pairing is this book for the daily how plus pick 1 for the why, and if you want the Ansible fundamentals as a book too, the Ansible book round-up ranks those separately.
Buy it if you run an Ansible shop and want current, tested patterns for the multi-tool reality of 2026. Skip it if you are theory-first, or if you have not touched Ansible at all yet. Print lands around $45 to $60; check the live price on Amazon.
4. Network Automation with Nautobot
Every automation effort eventually hits the same wall: the scripts work, but nobody trusts the data they run against. This 816-page Packt title (May 2024) is the book about fixing that. Nine authors from the Network to Code team, led by Jason Edelman, cover deploying Nautobot, modeling your network in it, extending it with Jobs and apps, and wiring it to Ansible so playbooks consume intended state from a source of truth instead of hand-edited inventory files.
The honest caveat is scale. A source of truth pays for itself when multiple people automate against hundreds of devices; on a 20-switch network run by one engineer, this is architecture you do not need yet. It is also unavoidably product-centric. The data-driven concepts transfer to NetBox and friends, but the chapters are Nautobot chapters. Authors from the same Network to Code team wrote Modern Network Observability (Packt, October 2024) as the day-2 companion, worth knowing about once the automation itself is humming.
Buy it when your team is past the script stage and inventory drift is the actual problem. Expect $50 to $65 in print; check the live price on Amazon.
5. Automating and Orchestrating Networks with NetDevOps
The shortest book here at 320 pages, and deliberately so. Ivo Pinto and Faisal Chaudhry, both CCIEs writing for Cisco Press (June 2023), cover the operating model rather than any single tool: source control for network config, pipelines that test changes before they touch production, orchestration across teams, and the cultural shift that makes any of it stick. It is the book to hand a manager or a senior engineer who keeps asking why the network cannot ship changes the way the software teams do.
Breadth is the trade-off. At this length nothing gets the code-level depth of the other five, and hands-on readers will finish it wanting the labs the Packt titles provide. Being a Cisco Press book it naturally reaches for Cisco examples, though the pipeline thinking is vendor-neutral. Pair it with pick 3 and the theory gets hands.
Skip it if you want to type along with every chapter. Buy it for the workflow model, usually $35 to $50 in print; check the live price on Amazon.
6. Network Automation with Go
The contrarian pick, and the right one for a specific reader. Nicolas Leiva and Michael Kashin (Packt, January 2023, 442 pages) teach network automation in Go, and the argument for bothering is that the modern telemetry and config-management ecosystem is written in it: gNMI, OpenConfig tooling, streaming telemetry collectors, and most of the network-adjacent cloud-native stack. If you intend to build tools other engineers run, rather than scripts you run yourself, Go is where that work happens.
It should not be your first automation book. The Python ecosystem for device interaction is deeper, the community answers are more plentiful, and this book assumes you already know networking cold. We would reach for it after pick 1 or pick 2, at the point where a one-off script needs to become a supported binary with tests. Print runs about $40 to $55; check the live price on Amazon.
From CCNA to automation engineer: where these books fit
The reading order depends on where you stand. An engineer still building routing and switching fundamentals gets more from the CCNA preparation shelf first, because every book above assumes you know what the automation is automating. From there, pick 1 builds the base, pick 2 or pick 6 gives you a language, and pick 3 gives an Ansible shop its daily patterns. Picks 4 and 5 are team-scale books; buy them when the problem stops being “write the script” and becomes “make twelve people’s automation coherent”.
Two cheap force multipliers alongside whichever you choose: a lab to break, which costs nothing beyond the GNS3 setup, and a clear-eyed view of the tool landscape before you commit a team to one, which the configuration management comparison lays out. Books teach the patterns; the lab is where they become yours.
