Customer Reviews

CCIE Routing and Switching Certification Guide (4th Edition)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a solid read. I will warn you, it can be "high level" on a lot of different concepts. What I mean by high level is this book is more about hitting the highlights than the nitty gritty.

If you are like me, did your CCNA and your CCNP, then this book will make sense. It admits that "goes into a little more detail than the CCNP material" and that sounds about right. If you are looking for a book and you are a noob that wants to learn about networking this book is NOT for you.

Who's this book for? People that want to take the CCIE Routing and Switching Exam version 4. The book tells you that is what it's for. So again, if you are a CCNP and I mean a REAL CCNP and not some retard who memorized a bunch of answers and can actually perform REAL network duties, then you will be fine with this book.

It will cover what you need to know for the CCIE RS written which really, covers a broad set of topics and doesn't go deep into everything. The lab however will, so while this will get you through the written don't forget to add the following books:

Routing TCP/IP Volume 1 second edition, jeff doyle (CISCO PRESS)
Routing TCP/IP Volume 2, jeff doyle (CISCO PRESS)
MPLS Fundamentals, cisco press

You may also want to read the BCMSN book by cisco press as well.

So for the CCIE RS written, this book is good for that but if you want deep and explanation of line by line what things do, the background on them - this is more of a fly by but essential for your CCIE RS written exam.

So for the CCIE RS Written = 5 stars, if you are using this for the lab, 3 stars you need more, but they tell you that in the book so kudos to them :)

-Nick

This book has allot of errors. Besides typos and references to tables they have some information just wrong. For example it talks about PIM-DM state refresh messages. Book says they are sent upstream from routers, however when I tested it in the lab I found that the messages can only be originated at the source interface for the S,G and sent downstream and are not enabled by default as the book would have you think. This makes me wonder about the credibility of the rest of the information in the book. Most information seems correct however. They really should have taken more time fact-checking and editing this book. Some sections are broad overviews and I find myself reading into more specifics in the CCNP books that cover the same topic.

I bought this book to prepare my CCIE written exam and what can I say is that this book is one of the best books I've ever read on networking. I started my Cisco Career with the CCNA exam book and the style is very similar (thanks Mr Odom).

You will be able to find DIKTA topic (Do I Know This Already ?) and it really help to gauge your knowledge on the topic. I tought I knew the spanning-tree protocol and after I checked the answer I told myself that I needed to read a bit more about it .... Such a great thing !

The content is very well-structured, all concepts are supported by numerous examples so even if one doesn't understand the subject in it's depth he or she can find an answer to a specific real-world question.

This book will provide you great insight and deep understanding of a wide scope of networking subject.
It definitely helps to understand the technology. The words used by the authors are very simple to understand and it is very easy then for a non fluent english speaker (such as me).


The examples used in the scenarios makes you feel confident with the topic.

This book is A MUST Have for every serious CCIE student. I highly recommend it !

Also you will receive a DVD which let you install Boson software and practice the CCIE written exam. It is awesome to train on that product. It really helped me !

Exceptionnal work Wendell Odom, Rus Healy, Denise Donohue.

I am already a CCIE. This is the 4th edition that I have purchsed.

The bad is that this edition no longer includes a PDF of the book on the CD.

The good is that this book is essential for passing the written, there is no other book that wraps it up in one package like this one. I just wish that they would do a version of this book for the voice CCIE.

The book covers the new exam topics and is useful as a reference. There are a lot of errors, especially when being referred to a particular table number and it doesn't exist. It seems the book was rushed for printing and wasn't reviewed thoroughly. Other than these issues the book was a nice read and I would highly recommend Cisco Press take their time on the next edition.

This is a very good book, not only if you are studying for your CCIE but just for general knowledge. After getting my CCNP and CCDP I felt there were situations I would run into at work where it would be necessary to engineer certain things and I just couldn't find a way to do it with the knowledge I had from my studies for those certs. My employer asked me to pursue my CCIE (I was planning on it anyway) and I happened to see this book just came out around the time I had finished my CCDP, which was exactly when I had planned on pursuing my CCIE. After reading through about half this book, I have already seen many answers to those engineering questions I have had in the past. Usually this has been related to certain BGP attributes for multiple ISPs and things of that nature, but there has been others as well.

While this has been great for new knowledge, it is very in depth and solidifies the concepts learned early on in your networking studies. This of course is good for the test, but also reminds you of the little things you might not have thought about in a while. While progressing we sometimes forget the simple stuff, this is a good review for that. I will definitely be keeping this in my library for some time.

I found this book to be well-organized and presented in a fashion that aids learning. In particular, I really enjoyed the IPv6 and MPLS chapters, which I didn't have much experience with. I feel like I have a solid understanding of both now. Most of the errors I found were corrected in released Errata; however, one still has not. Don't let this trip you up--regarding 3560 Switch QoS on page 558 it states the following in regards to Egress Queues:

"Both shared and shaped mode schedulers prevent the PQ from exceeding its configured bandwidth when all the other queues have frames waiting to be sent. The shaped scheduler never allows any queue, PQ or non-PQ, to exceed its configured percentage of link bandwidth, even if that means that link sits idle."

That is really not correct, as you can see here on Cisco documentation: [...]
"The expedite queue is a priority queue, and it is serviced until empty before the other queues are serviced."

I ran this by a few other engineers, and they also agree with this assessment, that it will indeed starve the other queues unless you explicitly configure policing. Overall, the book is really great though. I just hope they update that section. I'm also surprised that the book never mentions that Spanning-Tree BPDUs are sent to the MCAST address 01:80:C2:00:00:00. There's also not much detail on QinQ tunneling, and I had to access other resources to get the config portion.

Overall, though, I feel that this has covered all material you'll see on the lab pretty well, though it is not a deep-dive, and you need to master all of the config and troubleshooting with LOTS of hands-on still.

Who could better tell you what you want to know about a test than the company that produced the test? And in this case, the producer of the book and the originator of the test are one and the same -- Cisco.

This book is an exam cram book as well as a reference book on the subject. It's a big book - over a thousand pages and is written around the Cisco approach -- that is, the Cisco hardware, software and of course the exam itself. And if a thousand pages isn't enough, the companion CD-ROM contains 200 practice questions for the exam and more. Then there's a companion web site with yet more information and possibly a later revision of parts of the book.

The Cisco books have a standard format with standardized syntax, icons and philosophy. It is the standard book in its field.

I have to admit that I was a bit intimidated when I saw how thick this book is, as if the CCIE isn't scary enough. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is actually a pretty easy read and provides a very good foundation for written exam prep. You'll find nearly everything from the 4.0 exam blueprint is covered and the level of detail for each topic seems to be appropriate.

The only flaw I can think of is that the book is about 2 years old now which means it doesn't cover a few of the more recent blueprint tweaks Cisco has made but all in all I'd say it's 90+% of what you'll need to prepare.

Even if you're not looking to take the CCIE written this book is a worthwhile read just to become a more rounded network engineer.

I'm currently studying for my CCIE R&S and this book has been a great source of information. Odom doesn't waste any time in getting right down to the subject matter at hand. I highly recommend this book for anyone who is pursuing their CCIE.