Nick Buraglio and Brian E. Carpenter have released their comprehensive, continuously revised and edited resource on IPv6: A free and open source IPv6 textbook. It’s well worth a read and bookmark. The book is being hosted by the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC), which we’ve featured in APNIC Blog posts and PING podcasts before. Based in Oregon, NSRC provides the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) RouteViews Project and conducts training worldwide. Nick and Brian’s collaborative IPv6 book is a great addition to their stable of projects.
Brian and Nick bring decades of experience in designing, standardizing within the IETF, and deploying IPv6 in real-world scenarios. Releasing the book as a PDF offers helpful stability, and they mention it could lead to printed or bound editions in the future. However, they are actually working within GitHub, treating the book more as a ‘curated’ living document. If you have insights to help shape a better IPv6 future, they are keen to collaborate and have already acknowledged several community members for their valuable contributions.
Books like this don’t replace the RFCs but serve as valuable guides for navigating them — a complex collection of documents that sometimes present competing ideas and perspectives. These RFCs need to be understood as evolving views rather than fixed, unchanging references. This mirrors the nature of IPv6 itself, which has (within reason) evolved over time in how it’s implemented and how it functions across the wider public Internet.
The book carries an explicit ‘call to action’ in seeking people’s active participation in the IPv6 standardization process across several working groups in the IETF.
It’s a fantastic resource for anyone looking to get up to speed with IPv6 concepts and practical considerations. While there are some gaps — like the tools and troubleshooting section, which still needs more detail — it’s a living document, so we can expect improvements over time or even contribute directly.
At 139 pages and growing, there’s more to come. Well done to Nick and Brian for getting this out the door!
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