Cisco Systems Books

Although it is used for CCNP 1.0 exam, I think it is a good book anyway. It can give you a good explanation on the VLAN, especially the explanation on the product. You can get much information on Catalyst 5000/5500 series, 3000 series etc. That is the main point you should buy it.

This book has an awesome ATM section. The price of the book is worth that chapter alone. Although Sybex has an updated switching book out, this book has some seriously great information.

Plagiarism seems to be alive and well in the certification book industry--I found entire paragraphs in Lammle's CLSC book copied word for word from the Cisco Press CLSC Exam Guide and Cisco documentation. What have these guys got against footnotes and attributions? There are some important gaps, for instance, the book does not really cover Cisco's concepts of resource nodes/demand nodes, even though the 640-404 exam does have a number of conceptual and design questions. Before taking the exam and to fill in the gaps, you're well advised to review all the LAN switching white papers plus the hardware specs. available on the Cisco website. Like most books in the Sybex series, this one is sorely lacking in useful diagrams and illustrations--this is one advantage that the Cisco Press series has, but again you can compensate by hitting the website. Another inadequacy in the Lammle book is its poor presentation of the switch OS commands. I gave this book 3 stars because despite its shortcomings, it is somewhat more palatable and easier to follow than the Cisco Press one, and because some of its chapters are actually quite good--such as the one on ATM LANE. I got 100% correct in the ATM category on the 404 exam even though I didn't know much about this area before I picked up Lammle's book.

Todd Lammle's CCNA study guide is legendary and so I purchased this book hoping for the same performance. I was disappointed and felt that this book had no flow in its presentation and the concepts kept going back and forth.

I also felt that the technology sections in this book were weak, although that may have been a result of preparing the reader for CLSC, which is much more product specific than BCMSN (which is what I passed). This one definitely does not prepare you for the technology; only for the test.

If you plan to take BCMSN, do not buy this or any other CLSC book. You will not pass if this is all you use to prepare. There are several books out by now that are geared more for BCMSN. I personally recommend Cisco LAN Switching (Cisco Press) by Kennedy Clark.

This book is OK as an introduction to switching and for basic exam prep. Some parts, notably the chapter on ATM LANE, are quite good. However, several key areas are very poorly covered (the CLI, the Cat3000 series) or not treated at all (design concepts such as demand vs resource nodes--the 404 exam has a number of questions on this). You need to compensate by reading all relevant white papers and hardware specs from the Cisco website, and gaining all the hands-on practice with the CLI that you can. As with many of the Sybex books, the format is dull, unimaginative, and lacking in useful diagrams, but the material seems pretty accurate. What bothered me most about the Lammle CLSC book is that entire paragraphs were copied word for word from the Cisco Press book, without attribution. Aren't there laws against plagiarism?