CCNP Switching Exam Certification Guide [With CDROM]

Quite a good book that explains newer technology/features in an easy way - Concise.I use it to recertify my CCNP/DP and think this book is worth buying.

This an excellent book. I really like it. It helped me a lot to achieve my ccnp certification and at my job. Although it lacks some important details, for example, in STA and MLS, that makes me search a lot to find out some answers I had, it covers all the fundamentals necessary to configure switches properly and to do a great test.I like also the cd that comes with the book. First because I could print the exercises and write anything on the printed sheet, whithout writing on the book. Second, the test session is excellent and we have a lot of material.

I have been working with routers and switches for about 3 years, I have had little success finding an book that covers the Switching Exam for Cisco that provides all the necessary information and in a manner that is understandable and easy to follow, that was up till now. In this book the authors give you 15 different scenarios to work with as well as cover the topics of Layer 2, 3, and 4 switching along with Layer 3 routing. You also get exposure to the network design models and an excellent coverage of switch configuring. Along with that comes topics like VLANs, trunking, VTP, STP, ATM and LANE, inter-vlan routing, multilayer switching, HSRP, multicasting and most importantly troubleshooting the switch and configurations. Each chapter has review questions, there is excellent coverage of the switch and the commands, and the book has a great number of screen shots, diagrams and tables to work with. Included is a cd rom with over 200 practice questions in various testing formats. Overall the breakdown is great and the information is relatively easy to comprehend and follow.

The strengths in this book are chpt. 2 Campus Network Design, chpt. 6 Tunking with ATM LANE, and chpt. 9 HSRP. They were the best organized and well explained. The questions before and after each chapter were very helpful in understanding the chpt material. Chpt. 5 Redundant Switch Links that dealt with STP and such, chpts. 10 and 11 Multicast and Configuring Multicast cover very important material but left me wanting a better, more organized and complete explanation. Not the random, seemingly cut and paste jumbled up mess that I read (a little harsh.) The chapter on MLS, also an important topic, could have used some more or better explanation. The foundation summaries at the end of each chapter, which I like to review, were very light on summary details, and were generally lacking or incomplete. The rest of the book was sufficient in organization, topic explanation, and detail. Why five stars? Because overall the book is a really good coverage of the exam material, and with the accompanying CD ROM which contains a PDF file version of the book and over 200 test questions it's a great study guide package for the 640-504 exam. I would recommend it to anyone preparing for the switching exam.

Cisco courses are way to expensive to me, so I always go for book study. I always buy the Course book together with the certification guide. Sometimes the course book is better, sometimes the certification guide is better. (The CCNA certification guide is better than the main book, for CCDA it's the opposite)I don't completely like the way the BCMSN book is built, but love the certification book (and you get a testing CD-ROM !). The certification book explains things that were unclear to me by reading the BCMSN book, and it's easier to read.I rate this book 5 stars because it's doing what it's supposed to be, provide enough and complete information needed for on-the-job success and pass the exam. If you need more information there is the LAN SWITCHING "bible" which is complete but hard to read for a non-expert, or you can do a search on the cisco website for the excellent topic-related articles.....My advice is a definite "buy" or buy the new "CCNP certification library" to get 4 books in one ! I'll probably never buy non-cisco books again, some of them are easy to read but always seem to ignore things.