Cisco Systems Books

Even if you know the stuff I think it's not good to study using the certification guide. In theory you can save some time, but they don't provide details, that's why I prefer the cisco press course book instead. I've tried, but I really didn't like it.
:(

Daniel Lafraia
CCNP,CCDP

To understand this book you must have a good working understand of the CCNP foundation. Which is Switching Routing and remote access. In those books they cover the design parts that you need for the good design work. It is import to realize that there are many way to design a network that works succesfully. Cisco has it's own design ideas. I have taken the design exam and everthing you need to know is in the CID book. It may jump out and bit you but you have to look for it. I have everthing exept my IE and I will be doing that next year. So all I can say is if you think that this is easy and the exam will be easy you better go back and read the book and also go to Cisco web site and down load ATM design. It is a little more in depth than the book. I enjoyed this book and it was challanging in a few way but the points were delivered.

Having passed 6 Cisco exams (na, da, np)I must say this is the poorest excuse for Cisco study material I've yet encountered. That includes Cisco Press, Sybex/Lammle, and NetCerts. Gross conceptual innacuracies (not just typos!) frequently highlight the writers' fundamental misunderstanding of the topics. To think that one of the writers is a CCIE shakes my confidence in the program altogether.

I have only read up to Chapter 11 so far, and I find myself continually checking CCO just to confirm the veractity of statements made in the text. This should not be necessary!

I believe I will pass the CID exam due to my previous CCNP studies, but no thanks are offered to this book. Boooooooo.

Having passed 6 Cisco exams (na, da, np)I must say this is the poorest excuse for Cisco study material I've yet encountered. That includes Cisco Press, Sybex/Lammle, and NetCerts. Gross conceptual innacuracies (not just typos!) frequently highlight the writers' fundamental misunderstanding of the topics. To think that one of the writers is a CCIE shakes my confidence in the program altogether.

I have only read up to Chapter 11 so far, and I find myself continually checking CCO just to confirm the veractity of statements made in the text. This should not be necessary!

I believe I will pass the CID exam due to my previous CCNP studies, but no thanks are offered to this book. Boooooooo.

This book is about median on the Cisco Press quality see-saw. The chapters on SNA fill out a CCDP requirement that's hard to research elsewhere. The Voice over Data networking chapter is a nice summary, too. Otherwise, the writing of this book poorly rehashes what you should already know from the previous 5 exams you had to take before this one. I recommend getting this book, but reading it selectively, without intent to go cover to cover. I used this method, and passed the exam with a fat safety margin.

as titled, i cannot be more satisfied with what i received. The service is excellent! and shipping is speedy.

I've been working as a network engineer primarily using Adtran equipment for quite a few years. I'm moving more into the Cisco spectrum and decided to get my CCNA just because. This book is the biggest waste of money ever. While it does give you an idea of Cisco's obscure wording of questions/answers, the rest is absolute junk. There are so many wrong answers, grammatical mistakes, and missing answers that this book should have never made it to market. If I wasn't sure I needed to pick up another book, I would probably fail this test. WHAT A WASTE CISCO! I want a refund!

I, too, found this book to be problematic. Arguably, one of the most challenging concepts to understand and demonstrate on the certification exams is subnet planning.

For example:

With a class C address of 192.168.5.0, where you need 20 subnets with 5 hosts per subnet, subdivide the last octet into a subnet portion and a host portion and determine what the subnet mask is.

Page 251 and 252 quickly and confusingly attempted to cover the solution to this problem. However, the book left me confused and looking quickly for other explanations. So, I bought the Wendell Odom book CCNA INTRO Exam Certification guide (ISBN# 1-58720-094-5). This book made much more sense to me and there were two separate examples to drive home the solution.

Do NOT buy this - you will end up spending time returning it, or worse, having it sit on your shelf because you don't have time to return it and you just wasted a ton of money on this book!

It is filled with mistakes and contridictions

Very hard to read...boring is an understatement!!

Stick with Sybex...you won't be disappointed...I love the new Todd Lammle book. I learn and laugh, something that you can't find too much these days!!

Tech books often have mistakes. This one is unbelievable. This book feels more like learning via the gauntlet. You learn by double checking everything in this book against other sources.

It's too bad, I like the outline of the book, how it layers information in progressive steps. It's just too often bad info. And the Cisco errata sheet is a one page joke. Do not use this book as your only source.

Please note the one positive review here is reviewing the ICND book, not Intro.

I bought this book as a supplement to the Mark Lammle CCNA book and Virtual Lab. This was very helpful for preparing for the exam because not only did it give you questions to test a wide array of knowledge, but it also gave explanations for the answers in the back, unlike some of the test practice software. After practicing enough to be able to consistantly score high on the practice tests, I was able to pass the CCNA exam with a 924.

Way to go Exam Cram!!

This book was not very helpful at all. It probably covered about 10% of the materials on the exam. I did pass the exam with a 924/1000, but I thank my four years of experience with Cisco routers and networking for that and not the book. I wouldn't waste my money on this book.

The practice questions in this book are nothing like the real exam. I studied out of this book and out of Cisco's official materials. When i finally took the exam, i found that the questions on the real test were nothing whatsoever like the ones in this book. For starters, the real exam has trick questions that can be mastered, once you learn the official cisco mindset. This book won't prepare you in the least for those. In the end, i passed, but with no thanks to this book. It was Cico's own CCNA prep books that had the best info for the exam.

I used Exam Cram Practice Questions, the Sybex book and the Sybex E-trainner. I got from 85 to 95% on the Exam Cram tests, the Sybex book was OK, and the E-trainner was great. However the Exam Cram tests were nothing like the real CCNA test (I failed). The Exam Cram questions were too easy, didn't cover all the material, and if anything gave me the false impression the test would be straight forward. Did they make a mistake at the printer and sold a 640-407 book instead of a 640-507 book?? I think this book will look good in my fireplace, ON FIRE!!

I used this book as a supplement to the Exam Cram Routing and Switching book. I actually did not open this book until about 2 hours before my actual test. I ran through and did the questions, scoring 100% on everything. The questions presented in this book are a bit more difficult than those provided in the Exam Cram book, and on par with those presented in the CCNA test. Know the OSI model and some basic Cisco commands and you'll be golden. If you have touched Cisco routers or switches more than twice in your life, you'll breeze through this test, and this book is a quality piece of study material. I purchased the books, and was in the test center, breezing through my CCNA exam less than a week later.

This book is very difficult to follow. Topics are not presented in a way that promotes learning, full of lists of ill referenced tables and facts, abundant use of acronyms without definition. Many review questions referencing terms not presented. Typos abound, is it RTCP or RCTP? You've got me. A struggle at every turn of the page. Decidedly NOT recommended.

The CISCO CCDA training kit (like the CCNA training kit), is NOT a CBT. The individual reading assignments are actually just sections of an over 300-page long PDF file.

The "interactivity" is limited to a menu interface that just refers to sections of this huge PDF file. Using the practice tests, you can also jump to the page relevant to the question displayed. That is the extent of the "interactivity" of this product.

The good: 1. Information in the PDF file is more condensed than the Cisco press books, yet more elaborate than the "enough to pass" Sybex alternative. 2. The testing software has many useful options (Such as don't ask questions answered correctly N times) and can be effectively used as a study tool, as opposed to just a benchmark. It is definitely better than the testing software that comes with the certification books.

The bad: 1. Anybody who has used a real CBT module would be extremely disappointed in this product. There is no TRAINING element to just linking to a big ol' PDF file through a menu. 2. Navigating through one big PDF file is more awkward than using a real book. I ended up printing out over 150 pages (2 pdf pages per sheet of paper) and studying from that.

This product does not deliver as promised, and I would go as far as to say that the product description is in fact misleading. (Cisco never even MENTIONS Adobe Acrobat or PDF files.)

The bottom line is that if you are not confident that you can pass the real test - this product will help you determine weather or not you're ready. But one final thing to consider - for the price of this product, you can take the actual test itself.

I've taken other CBTs from Cisco, mostly on the web. Those were usually Powerpoint presentations with audio. I was very disappointed with this training.

The "CBT" is actually just a PDF that has been indexed by the menu-driven "study engine". Except that the PDF was written exclusively from the study engine. This is evident when you start with Chapter 1 and it takes you to page 53 in the PDF. Immediately, the PDF starts referencing material covered in the earlier pages (which you haven't read yet).

Like the other reviewer, I printed out the PDF on a duplexing printer (377 pages on 188 pieces of paper) and am reading the PDF in sequential page order.

THE GOOD: The test engine is very good and will allow me to "familiarlize" myself with the type of questions I might get on the test.

You complete the CCNA exam and now you ready to tackle the CCDA exam. You want to find some sort of application software to aids in your study. Cisco wrote the exam so why not let them give you a hand with the CCDA Training Kit.

As with the CCNA kit this also auto starts and under Windows 98, NT and 2000 the installation was easy and done in less that 2 minutes. I had to disable my anti-virus software but other than that no problems were encountered. The reading assignments will give you the material you need to comprehend before taking any practice exams. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader installed in order to use this feature.

There is also a study mode to give the chance to review any assignment. You can work at your own pace to make sure you understand each of the concepts. There are also practice exams to test you knowledge as you learn.

You have the option to register the software right on line and the questions seem together than any others I have come across. Finally you can run the application without the cd and overall this seems to be a good CCDA package.

The exam focuses on three areas: a broad overview of network technologies, a set of methodologies and guidelines for designing a network, and marketing information about Cisco products.

The book (it is actually a large PDF file, no computer-based training, as another reader pointed out) is somehow disappointing, in the sense that it is a careless cut-and-paste of good training papers and/or excerpts from pre-existing good and well written books.

Apparently, nobody cared to proofread the result. Just to give you a feeling:
at page 5.13 there is a "network health checklist", which claims to be the same network health checklist of chapter 3, "reported here for reader convenience". Unfortunately, it is different from the "network health checklist" at page 5.31 (8 items to check against 14), which shares the same claim.
There are many forward references to chapters 6,7 and 8, while there are only five modules.
Appendixes are also referred to throughout all the book, but none of them can be found.
You will also enjoy some "deja vu" experience (on page 4.19 and 4.34, for example), and from time to time you'll wonder if you have missed a page.
Sometimes the text is unreadable. For example, at page 3.89 and 4.89.
The ROI analysis for customer ABC at page 5.42 shows how you can draw the wrong conclusions in order to sell a new network project to an "actual customer" (to be honest, this is the only case in which I have found a true error in the book)

In conclusion, the lack of organization in the book makes more difficult to make a synthesis and to grasp the "big picture".

Despite this, the book reflects the exam contents, and the mock exam is very similar to the true one. This can be a good reason to buy the book.

I can provide you with these advices:

1. I have prepared both CCNA and CCDA before taking any actual exam, and passed CCNA two weeks before CCDA. I think it has been a good idea, do the same if you can.

2. Download CCDA exam notes (examnotes.net)... Those notes have a good summarization of all the steps necessary to do a good network design according to Cisco, and they can help you organize the parts of the course oriented towards methodology

3. During the exam, take note of the case studies when they are presented to you. You may want to draw a network map as well. You will leverage those information later, since you will be faced with three or four case studies during the exam, and there will be other subsequent questions on the same case study.

Good luck

This book has failed to define anything useful for me. It has very few terms for the number of pages, and the two sentence long definitions seem to be written for people outside of the computer industry. Not helpful at all.

This book is a handy reference manual to have around. With over 400 pages of terms, the information is a surface type of format, only giving the basic amount necessary.

From A to Z there are terms like ANSI, CDR, ELAN, ISDN, MUX, NAM, POTS, SMB, UDP and XID. Also there is a section strictly devoted to Cisco terms from CID, CNSI, EIRGP, FSIP, ISL, SDLC, TRIP and IRGP are but as few of the terms.

There could be a whole lot more added to this book including pictures of some things, a cd rom with an e-version of the book. Overall the value may not be worth the price.

This book would turn out to be a great book without the TYPOS... It has extensive coverage on ATM, Frame Relay and other telecommunication-only terms... Many "NEW" Terms and Acronyms are included for example 3G Mobile stuff... which isnt much of a surprise since it was first published in January 2001...
My advice? wait for the Second Edition.

If you are a CCNA student and plan on using this as your single source for tests you will be greatly dissapointed. I have read both this book and the old version since I have taken the CCNA course twice now. This book contains only about 80% of the test material... The older version is much better and contains twice as much information. Anyone who is serious about taking the ICND or CCNA Exam should NOT rely on this book... Please take it from someone who knows. This book was obviously thrown together too quickly, there is quite a few gramatical errors and missing information. Two Thumbs Down "If it aint broke don't fix it" stick with the old edition.

Note the words 'Companion Guide' in the title of this book. This book is intended to supplement the online information for version v3.1.1 of the CCNA # exam. It is a full textbook in its own right, which covers the same basic material as covered by the online curriculum. This has three real advantages:

First, the simple fact that the same material is covered by a different author means that he will use different words, different ideas, different examples to explain the same points. Often this difference means the real difference in understanding the material.

Second, while this book is being written by a Cisco contract employee, he doesn't have to go through the full approval cycle that the online folk did. Therefore the writing doesn't have to be as bland and dull. This too helps in the understanding.

Third, you can take it with you, on a plane, to bed, the bathroom, where ever you want to read and don't have online access. ==Finally, this covers the same material as online in the same order, with the same chapter headings, etc. All in all, an excellent adjunct to the online material.

I have to say that although the first two books in the CCNA Companion Guide series were good (CCNA 1 Networking Basics and CCNA 2 Routers and Routing Basics), each being 400-500+ pages long with detailed information, the last two companion books (CCNA 3 Switching Basics and Intermediate Routing and CCNA 4 WAN Technologies) have been stripped down to 200+ pages each but still at the same price as the first two!

This is in stark contrast to the actual course material which can be seen in the CCNA ICND self study book is much more rigorous and detailed than the CCNA Intro self study book. This tells me that the 3,4 companion guides should also be much more detailed in order to prepare the candidate adequately.

Not worth the money.

I actually bought this book a little over a year ago. I bought it for the promise of a good overview of Cisco internetworking. I was very disappointed with the book because it seems to be nothing more than a compiled source of protocol definitions and feature lists of various Cisco devices, without explaining how to use or configure them.
I will give the book some credit for having a pretty decent chapter on Wide Area Networking and Wireless networking. You would be better served to look for internetworking knowledge elsewhere.

I found the book to contain too many errors, and the writing style was not user friendly (The book did not flow well). This book tries to cover many topics; some topics are covered very well, others fall far short. I do not recommend this book to anyone who is looking for solid reference guide. There are too many actual good books available out there.

I am getting a little sick and tired of dealing with Cisco press. Every book I own is so filled with errors it makes understanding concepts difficult. How hard is it to make sure your diagram is correct.

I am reading about Inter-provider VPN, is it too much to ask that your explanation match the diagram you are referring to! I mean, AS numbers are inaccurate, the diagram is mislabeled all over the place and none of it makes sense.

Every time I submit an error Cisco never even bothers to acknowledge me much less actually make the correction. I have 3 MPLS books from Cisco that I have submitted errors for months ago and still no correction!


By the way Cisco your books aren't cheap! The least you could do is have the decency to provide correct error free information.

This is the first MPLS book I have bought (have more than a couple) that is devoted to the actual configs to make MPLS work. Most of my other texts gloss over the nuts and bolts.

I could not resist the opportunity to inform others that are in pursuit of their CCNP. I usually buy test preps from a variety of publishers in order to get a well-rounded test bank with questions asked in a variety of different ways before I attempt a cert test. I have my CCNA and have passed the BSCI and BRAN exams, and am preparing for the BMSN exam currently. I found the CCNA for Dummies to be a very helpful little addition to the other 4 test preps I had purchased, however they really had no business whatsoever putting out the CCNP for Dummies, All In One Test Prep book. It is everything and more of what I have read on this site about the Cisco CCNP Test Yourself Practice Exams. Please do not waste your money or time on this POS. For one, there is no Remote Access exam. They accidentally put the Routing exam under Remote Access, so you have two identical practice tests, one called Routing and one called Remote Access. The answers provided for the Switching sometimes do not even go with the question. One question asks which layer of the OSI model is the Application Layer and the options do not include a number 7, rather they offer you 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 as possible correct answers. Unbelievable trash. Whoever put this together was in way too much of a hurry, or ... something.

This only a water-down version of the original books. There are not very many animated explainations to explain difficult concepts. It is not as useful as the author has promised. It can only be used as a review tool, but not a main study text.

It seems as though this book was writen without consulting the ACRC exam objectives. There are a lot of questions regarding IGRP and DLSw. These two topics aren't even covered by ACRC. There are some good questions to help you with your studying, but don't get this book if you expect an accurate exam simulation.

This is the worst technical text book I've ever bought. There are so many mistakes in it, I've stopped counting. Numerous questions attempt to get you to recite the proper syntax for a command, yet the answers sometimes ALL contain syntax errors. An example is a multiple choice question where all 4 answers contain "dialer-map" instead of "dialer map". (p310). Funny thing is, the question's explanation later on spells out the correct syntax for the command without the hyphen. Other mistakes in IP addressing, IPX addressing, etc, abound such as one where the IPX host address is clearly incorrect being longer than 48 bytes, yet the author overlooks it. Many questions and answers are misleading and sometimes just plain wrong. The answer to one question claims that "frame relay requires two routers." (p 341). The reality is, FR doesn't require ANY routers! It is a layer 2 service that can be terminated with a FRAD if you want. The explanation also implies that the service provider uses a router when in reality it is generally a FR switch port. I know what the auther was trying to get at, but both the question, the 4 possible answers, and the explanation are totally misleading. Many of the diagrams contain mistakes or are missing key information. Frequently they reference in the question the AS number, but the AS number is either missing from the diagram or a different number altogether. You frequently have to figure out what they meant and what the error was to infer the correct answer. I could go on and on with examples. This book is so bad I am trying to figure out how to write the author and how to get my money back. I agree with someone else's review that it appears some parts were NEVER proofread. A subject like this, where the exam requires EXACT answers and correct syntax, needs to be thoroughly proofread by several engineers. A missing hyphen or misplaced decimal point is the difference between right and wrong. It is possible this book will hurt your studying efforts because you will be led to believe some things that are false or misleading.

I was disgusted by the poor quality of this book. I've read through many test prep books, and this is by far the worst of them. It was full of errors, typos, bad diagrams, etc. I have taken and passed all four CCNP exams, and this book was no help for any of them.

The book's test questions were very far off from what I took (including BCRAN). This is a horrible investment; I'd stick to Cisco Press books.

I Never expected anything like this from Cisco! The Books for CCNP are great but this Training kit is far from being a reasonable product! The Learning Mode is OK, but for the incorrect answers you have to dig yourself for the explanation thru the link they provide, which is painful. It would be great if the explanation is right there for you like most of the selftest software on the market. It would score on time saving and less pain on neck!

The exam mode is the worst feature of this product. You don't have the option to choose an indivual exam mode. This feature is annoying since you must accept to test for all the subjects weather you're going to take a single exam or Not. GREAT!

I don't recommend anyone to spend this much money on the product. Buy a selftest software that provides an answer and explanation, and you'll be glad you did!!!

I can't believe Cisco put this one out for such a high Price. It is absolutely Insane. Some other testing software(ex: selftest software) provide a much better deal for the money.

I don't understand why such a high price software doesn't provide an explanation for the answers. Instead you have a link to search the whole pdf yourself! Not very nice considering that after reading the books you want to minize your time. An explanation would be right to the point, unless Cisco is thinking that reading the book a thousand time until you memorize it is worthed.

The exam mode is the worst I have seen. Even the worst company in the whole world has a better product than this one. Where does anyone expect to practice for the 4 CCNP exams simultaneously? certainly you want to be able to choose each individual test. That's what makes sense to a rational human thinking animal. Does Cisco think people are going to take all the CCNP exams on the same day? Again absolutely ridiculous. You can not choose individual practice exams.

My advice: don't spend a single penny for this pack. Its worth is on 20-35 dollars range. Buy anything else except this one. I demand that Cisco has a free update of the software for those who bought the product and got stuck with it. I was so mad about this product that I spent another 200 dollars to buy another testing software. Selftest Software is great and close to the real exam. Not mentioning that they provide real explanations and guarantee within 90 days of the date of your purchase. If you don't pass the exam they refund your money. That's how confident they feel about their product. That's what Cisco should have done...

Over the past six months Cisco has made changes to most of the CCNA and CCNP exams and new exams have been released. This software is a good study tool for the CCNP exams. While the software covers the 640-5X series and should be updated to the 600 series I think you still have a excellent tool to work with.

There is over 1600 questions covering the four exams and judging from the content of the material you have questions that go beyond the exam objectives. I was able to install the software in Windows 95, 98, NT workstation, 2000 and XP Professional with out error or failure.

The package has you starting off with reading assignments and with the CCNP Prep and Certification libraries as go to reference guides you have one of the best tools available. After the reading section you then work in the study mode and then the practice exam mode, which makes for a good training layout.

I though the question were challenging and in some cases very tough to answer, since this a training kit I did use several resources to study with and a few questions I was unable to find and answer. Once updated to the latest tests, add a pdf version of the test(s) and correct a few grammar errors and this kit would be a the top of the lists.

Having the entire CCNP library on PDF is really nice.

The questions included with this package are very poorly written and in some cases completely wrong!

In using this software to test my knowledge in preparation for my CCNP recert I found that at least 20% of the questions had serious problems.

-questions were so poorly written that it was difficult, if not impossible, to answer them.
-the answers provided did not match the question being asked
e.g. - you were asked a question about OSPF, but the answers provided were for BGP!!
-there are some questions where the exact same answer is listed twice (and it seems that no matter which one you choose , you're incorrect)
-There are questions that are just completely wrong!!
-There are questions where the ACRONYMS are MISSPELLED!!! which can be, needless to say, confusing!!

all in all, it was worth it to get all the books on PDF.. But I was extremely disappointed in the testing content.

If you are looking for test questions - don't buy this package - look at Boson tests instead.

Over the past six months Cisco has made changes to most of the CCNA and CCNP exams and new exams have been released. This software is a good study tool for the CCNP exams. While the software covers the 640-5X series and should be updated to the 600 series I think you still have a excellent tool to work with.

There is over 1600 questions covering the four exams and judging from the content of the material you have questions that go beyond the exam objectives. I was able to install the software in Windows 95, 98, NT workstation, 2000 and XP Professional with out error or failure.

The package has you starting off with reading assignments and with the CCNP Prep and Certification libraries as go to reference guides you have one of the best tools available. After the reading section you then work in the study mode and then the practice exam mode, which makes for a good training layout.

I though the question were challenging and in some cases very tough to answer, since this a training kit I did use several resources to study with and a few questions I was unable to find and answer. Once updated to the latest tests, add a pdf version of the test(s) and correct a few grammar errors and this kit would be a the top of the lists.