Customer Reviews

CCNA Security Exam Cram (Exam IINS 640-553)

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

 

 

I purchased this book to prepare for the CCNA Security Exam due to the ratings I saw at the Amazon store. The book is pretty concise and everything is really well explained. The only dissapointing thing is the fact that there is a chapter not fully covered in the book. That is the Securing Layer 2 devices chapter. To have a full read about that topic, I would recommend the CCNA Security Official Exam Certification Guide from Cisco written by Kevin Wallace. Anyway, the Exam Cram has result in a very good book to read for preparing the exam, which I hope pass in a few weeks.

Hope you find interesting this review.

This was the second book I studied from for the IINS exam.

It has good solid coverage of the exam, no complaints there.

I was glad to have this book just for a different style of writing to the official Cisco exam guide. Wouldn't say one or the other was better, just liked having two takes of the same material.

I primarily used this resource to prep for the exam and I passed. It covers the basic concepts necessary to understand Cisco's take on security, and then it incorporates how different Cisco technologies implement the different aspects of the security triad. As a background, I had Security+ and obviously my CCNA before I began studying for this exam.

When I took my CCNA exam, I was in a college structured class. As we neared the end of the final class, I used ExamCram for my CCNA as a review material. I didn't use it like I've seen others, as a "cheat" type of material to just try and get the cert. I would review my material and notes, then see how I would do on questions presented in the book.

I expected to do the same as I prepare for my CCNA Security exam, by using this book. It is not the same as the CCNA Exam Cram. Each chapter is basically a training chapter on a particular topic, with about 10-20 review questions at the end. It's more of a prep book rather than a test book. While it does help me in my studying and review of my notes and labs I've been working on, I thought it could have been better.

I used Cisco's own CCNA Security book, which is dry dry dry (like most Cisco books). I also used another CCNA Security prep book that is better worded, and has similar testing questions for review at the end of each chapter. You're better off with that then this book alone. This would be an expensive supplement.

For a exam cram this book had quite a bit of content not on the test. Even some of the "exam alerts" were not on the test.

I thought the visual representation of encryption algorithms was very helpful. I really liked that test questions not only explained why the right answer was correct but why the wrong answers was wrong therefore I could figure out what questions that the wrong answers would be the correct answer for.

I started using this book for reading and studying when I noticed....Pages 369-416 were missing. Does this happen very often? It seems like a pretty large blunder.

Other than that, there are excellent overviews of exam topics, and the always handy cram sheet. Also, to the publisher's credit, a pdf of the book contains the missing pages. But you can't print the missing pages, ugh. Whenever I get a replacement book, I'll try and upgrade this review, but by then it will probably be too late. Anything above a single star would be unfair to folks reading this. I hope I pass my exam this week.