Customer Reviews

LAN Switching and Wireless, CCNA Exploration Companion Guide

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is the third book of four in the Cisco's CCNA Exploration. The book is very thorough and covers all areas needed to prepare for the CCNA exam. The quality of the material is very professional, and the writers were very knowledgeable. I recommend this book to everybody who is planning on taking the CCNA exam. The book covers in detail VLAN, VLAN Trunking, Spanning Tree Protocol, and many other important areas of Layer 2 and layer 3 switching configuration. The book also has a very low price compared to other books of the same quality.

Great book. It has everything you need to take the 3rd course of the CCNA curriculum. It's always better to have the book for this classes instead of the online material only.

My son needed this book for his CCNA Class. He thinks it is very helpful. He's getting pretty good grades.

The book is meant to let you pass the corresponding Cisco switching exam. For this ends, it furnishes a good and comprehensive discussion of the subject. The equipment covered is naturally Cisco's. Typically the text describes steps you take at the command terminal hooked up to a switch. Ah, but one very important case emphasised is the remote access of the switch, using a virtual terminal (vty). Naturally, a cracker could break in across the network. So you need to secure all the vty lines.

A key idea is the privileged EXEC mode. Once a user gets that, she can configure anything on the switch. It seems that earlier verions of the switch stored the password to EXEC in a readable text string inside a startup configuration file. So someone who could read that file could ascend to EXEC at a later time. Hmm! While the book does not outright admit it, this was a flaw in those earlier operating systems. To anyone experienced with computers, and not necessarily with switches in particular, this part of the text comes across clearly. Anyway, Cisco upped its game. Now there is an option to encrypt the password. Wonder why it took so long?

Another major idea in the book is the virtual LAN [VLAN]. You can have multiple IP networks on the same switching network. It gives tremendous flexibility when your company or organisation has disparate subgroups with different needs. This is one of the important sections of the text. Because regardless of passing the exam, if you have to administer a real world network, being able to make VLANs can greatly improve the performance and security of your overall network.

The text goes on to show how to perform routing between 2 or more VLANs. More complex administration but the task will be inevitable if you have to set up several VLANs.

Separate from all the above is the last section of the book, on running a wireless LAN. The discussion here is quite good, with well drawn diagrams that illustrate frequent geographical or topological issues when deploying a wireless access point or router. You can also anticipate that maintaining such a router will be a common chore. The book cautions that the intrinsic wireless nature of the LAN means that it can be more vulnerable to attacks, since the attacker does not need to physically attach to a wired network. In turn, the latter means that the attacker can be outside a home or office or coffeehouse, within which the only access to that LAN is meant to occur.

From the text, it appears that the administrative tasks for a wireless LAN are simpler than running a VLAN on a wired network.

This book is a required book for the CCNA Networking Academy. It will prepared you for what you need to know to get certified. There are four courses and so far each of the Cisco Press books have been very easy to read.

This book mainly focuses on the Switching and Wireless concepts of the CCNA Exam. As a CCNA you will be expected to know how VLANs work, the different types of VLANs, configuring VLANs, inter-vlan routing, VTP, STP, and wireless concepts. This book does a nice job explaining all of these concepts and making them easy to understand! The diagrams/pictures in each chapter were really explained well and helped me understand the concepts. The summary at the end of each chapter helped me review all that I had read in the chapter. The quizzes at the end of each chapter also helped me go back and review the concepts that I didn't understand. There were also challenging questions and activities at the end of each chapter that really tested my understanding of the concepts that I learned. The key terms were listed on the front of each chapter, and I found it convenient because I could flip back to the glossary and look up whatever definition I was unfamiliar with. After studying the chapters through this book, I now have the knowledge of all the CCNA level switching concepts and the basic wireless concepts. The activities in each chapter helped me learn how to configure VLANs, VTP, STP, and inter-vlan routing. You must purchase the LAN Switching Wireless Labs to go with it! It gives you the hands on experience that you need.

pretty straight forward. book was in new condition received it withing a few days of ordering. recommened to everyone pursuing a CCNA or CCNT or even higher certification level.

This lab manual is exactly as the other labs from the series.
As the other books it comes with the CD with a couple of exercises per chapter.
It could have more, but it has a minimum.

This book is terrible... I simply have to say it.

Oh, it looks good... the layout looks professional and the writing is grammatically correct, but the writer simply confuses the hell out of you. He leaves out critical conceptual connections which you will need for the final CCNA test.

His chapters on VTP and STP, in particular, are just abysmal. He cryptically implies things that you can only figure out through exhaustive inference and, in too, too many cases, he contradicts himself with a horrendously poor choice of logical specifiers in his sentences.

For the chapters on VTP and STP, you'd be better off to consult the Cisco Net Academy lessons or, possibly, an independently-published book on CCNA switching and wireless.

Awful book. Some parts are okay, but they're the easy parts. When you really need a good CCNA 3 book the most -- to explain the most difficult topics such as VTP and STP -- it completely poisons your head.

Just awful.

The author is very repetitive. Whoever edited this book needs to be fired. Chapters are way too long and need to be broken down into smaller sections in order for material to be better digested. I'm disappointed but I guess it's the only one out there. I'm no expert, but it really should be edited.