As a person who does technical writing, I can understand how small mistakes or oversights can find their way into a text. Nevertheless, the problems we see in this volume are not small. Aside from the typos, configuration syntax errors, and other problems, my biggest issues involve diagrams that are incorrectly labeled or lack critical information. An example can be found in chapter 19, where the author puts forth a GET VPN configuration example. The IP addressing scheme in the diagram does not match the router output (on the diagram it has 172.16.x.x and in the router it is 172.17.x.x). In task one, the author says to input an IKE policy but does not say which router he is working on. Instead of putting a hostname into the router so we can see what is going on, virtually all examples in the book have a router(config)# prompt. Oh, and it gets better: in his VPN example he has the wrong subnet specified as the interesting traffic to be protected, and he doesn't tell us what address is assigned to the interfaces where the crypto maps are applied. You couldn't have messed a chapter up worse than this--it is like Cisco is deliberately trying to confuse people who read the book.
I found myself ditching this text and going right to the Cisco whitepapers and online examples. The book never should have made it to print.
This is quite possibly the worst textbook i have ever come across. It is filled with typo's! And they're not just in the text, in example 18-1 they have a line of config "yunnel mode gre multipoint"! Unfortunately that is not the worst of it, the biggest problem is that the examples they include don't always follow the explanation. So they may be using one ip range in an explanation and another in the printed config example, as you can imagine this makes it a lot harder to follow what is going on.
The book contains a lot of information, but heck they all do, I'm not a huge fan of the Cisco Press books, but it seems the higher the test that is pretty much what you get. The material is pretty intuitive and covers what appears to be all the information for the test. Like some reviews there are repeated items and some types or information that does not appear accurate. However I did OK on the test, almost passed, but I did only give myself 3 weeks to study and I didn't have any hands on practice with the material. That is something I would do but in this case I had a free test to take and jumped on it. I will study more slowly and get the hands on that I need, but as far as the book goes I think it is an excellent starting point and contains enough information to know what you need to do well on the test. Good Luck.
I should leave myself a bit of the blame in this purchase since the previous reviews were less than stellar. I almost felt sorry for the author, well, that was until I started reading. I finished it last night and I'm still left to wonder how this got past the technical review process. Like others, I had to research and cross reference multiple items because honestly I couldn't "trust" this is as a single repository. I assume that along with other Cisco Press books should be the de-facto standard for exam prep material, considering that is their primary goal with these "cert guides". While I will still attempt to sit the exam, I'm not sure how well this particular guide really assisted in getting me there. I'm quite disappointed and hope the 2nd Edition may be more worthwhile. I can't really recommend this book until then.
I read the other reviews, downloaded the errata, then made the corrections in the physical book. I figured this would address the majority of the problems that people are having. I've encountered a larger problem though. I just can't trust this book and having to spend so much time fact checking is making the book rather worthless and almost detrimental as a study resource. I reached a point where I was going to just make an outline from the table of contents and then research the topics myself. If you are thinking about buying this book, just grab a copy of the table of contents. That's what you can expect. They broke things up into 4 parts and the chapters don't necessarily match the sections. You can tell there was a lot of copying and pasting done while making this book because items were duplicated and not changed.
Take all 6 Star Wars movies, substitute Luke Skywalker in the place of Darth Vader in half of Vader's scenes (including those in which both appear onscreen simultaneously). Neglect to mention anything about the familial relationships of Vader/Anakin-Luke-Leia and then film the whole thing with some of the actors appearing occasionally in their street clothes. Then release the episodes in a random order with "A New Hope" coming last and two of the episodes titled "Revenge of the Sith". You would then have the Star Wars equivalent of this book.
I knew this was going to be a rough read when the very first sentence of Chapter 1 was a grammatical nightmare, but since it's technical material I set aside my reservations about the quality of the writing and focussed on the technical merits. Sadly, only disappointment lay in that direction as well. Serious and obvious technical errors abound - as an example, the most recent one I read showed a sample configuration which included an access list where the author mistakenly entered a subnet mask rather than a wildcard mask. While the statement is still technically syntactically valid, it would have a very different effect than was described - a clear indication that neither of the authors nor either of the technical reviewers bothered doing anything as basic as actually *testing* the configurations they wrote up prior to publishing. This one is merely an example - additional technical errors can be found in multiple places.
Overall, the book reads as if written by someone whose grasp on the English language is tentative at best, and whose mastery of the subject matter seems questionable. I expected better from Cisco.
Like for first reviewer, I am currently using this book towards by certification exam and find it poorly written and mistake-prone. To properly understand the subject matter and be certain of the accuracy of the information being read, you will have to constantly research other information on the internet. I find myself regularly scouring the Cisco.com support pages for additional information, to explain topics better or deal with mistakes in the book. Should be of a much higher standard.
*** I have since finished this book and while I was hopeful that it would improve as I continued sadly it did not. Without even attempting to find mistakes in the book I was constantly presented with them. While most were typos there were still many technical errors. The amount of typos, though in themselves relatively easy to correct, only made me less confident in the quality of technical material I was reading. One of the most embarrassing errors I found was when doing the "Do I Know This" questions for Chapter 15. When checking the answers in the back of the book, question 3 has the answer as literally "E?" as though not even the writer was not sure and question 7 an answer of "S" when the options presented are A, B, C, D or E. If even these basic things can't be checked and corrected during review what level of confidence is a reader meant to have in the rest of the book.
Another issue I had with the book was that it seemed the CLI commands presented in examples were not entered into and then copied directly from a Cisco device but instead typed directly into the book script and formatted manually as there are many examples of syntax errors and wrong formatting which would not exist if the context was copied directly from a console/SSH session. An example of this is in example 21-10 where the command "ca trust-point MY-TP" is misspelt as "ca trust-poitn MY-TP" and example 20-14 places a hyphen between the words policy and group when this is not the syntax and should be "policy group". Example 17-24 also misses the EIGRP process number from the "no ip next-hop-self" command for example. These are just some of the many syntax errors I found that I believe are a result of this content of the book not being copied from commands first input into a switch or router.
I could go on but basically when a book is marketed as the guide for an exam and endorsed by a company that is not only the exam creator but one of the largest companies in the world the book should be much better than this. This book needs serious work.
I am currently using this book to prepare for the 642-637 exam. I think this book was poorly written. There are so many errors, both technical an non-technical. There are flaws that should not pass through a technical review and remain uncorrected. Yet they did. This makes one to wonder as to what the technical review is all about then. I'll advise anyone who is using this book as an exam prep tool to also use Cisco's documentation on its website. The authors and technical reviewer need to revisit this material.
Product Details :
Hardcover: 800 pages
Publisher: Cisco Press; 1 edition (July 7, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1587142805
ISBN-13: 978-1587142802
Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 1.5 x 9.3 inches
More Details about CCNP Security Secure 642-637 Official Cert Guide 1st edition
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