About The Book
Source for Software-Defined Networks: A Systems Approach is available on GitHub under terms of the Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. The community is invited to contribute corrections, improvements, updates, and new material under the same terms. While this license does not automatically grant the right to make derivative works, we are keen to discuss derivative works (such as translations) with interested parties. Please reach out to discuss@systemsapproach.org.
If you make use of this work, the attribution should include the following information:
Read the Book
This book is part of the Systems Approach Series, with an online version published at https://sdn.systemsapproach.org.
To track progress and receive notices about new versions, you can follow the project on Mastodon. To read a running commentary on how the Internet is evolving, and for updates on our writing projects, you can sign up for the Systems Approach newsletter.
Releases and Editions
We continually release open source content in GitHub, with print and
ebook editions
published from time-to-time. The latest print and ebook (2nd Printing)
corresponds to the v2.0 tag.
In general, master contains a coherent and internally consistent
version of the material. (If it were code, the book would build and
run.) Minor fixes are checked directly into master, but new
content under development is checked into branches until it can be
merged into master without breaking self-consistency. The web
version of the book available at https://sdn.systemsapproach.org is
then continuously generated from master.
Minor releases (e.g., v1.1) are tagged whenever there is
sufficient improvements or new content to warrant the effort. This is
done primarily to create a snapshot so that everyone in a course can
know they are using the same version.
Build the Book
To build a web-viewable version, you first need to download the source:
$ mkdir ~/systemsapproach
$ cd systemsapproach
$ git clone https://github.com/SystemsApproach/SDN.git
$ cd ~/sdn
The build process is stored in the Makefile and requires Python be
installed. The Makefile will create a virtualenv (venv-docs) which
installs the documentation generation toolset. You may also need to
install the enchant C library using your system’s package manager
for the spelling checker to function properly.
To generate HTML in _build/html, run make html.
To check the formatting of the book, run make lint.
To check spelling, run make spelling. If there are additional
words, names, or acronyms that are correctly spelled but not in the dictionary,
please add them to the dict.txt file.
To see the other available output formats, run make.
Contribute to the Book
We hope that if you use this material, you are also willing to contribute back to it. If you are new to open source, you might check out this How to Contribute to Open Source guide. Among other things, you’ll learn about posting Issues that you’d like to see addressed, and issuing Pull Requests to merge your improvements back into GitHub.
If you’d like to contribute and are looking for something that needs attention, see the wiki for the current TODO list.