CCIE Practical Studies 2 (CCIE Self-Study). Hands-on experience for the CCIE lab exam. (Cisco Press Practical Studies Series) [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

I recently read the book titled "CCIE Self-Study: CCIE Practical Studies Volume II" by Karl Solie and Leah Lynch. ISBN: 1587050722. The book has quite a bit of information in it. I have read quite a few books from the Cisco Press CCIE library and must say that this title is a good compliment to the collection.
I like how the information is presented in this title. The authors have done a good job organizing the information. The format really helps to grasp the concepts and most importantly the implementation of certain features. The figures and illustrations in this title are exceptional. Especially in the chapters regarding Quality of Service. The diagrams help out a lot with conceptualizing the logic applied to some of the many queuing strategies. There are some diagrams pertaining to certain queuing strategies that I have not seen on other books, which help me to better understand the queuing mechanism a lot better.
This book is best suited for Small business and Enterprise professionals seeking to gain a solid understanding of particular networking features in Cisco equipment. Some Service Provider professional might find the BGP chapter to be very useful. I would recommend this book to those individuals or study groups that are starting out on their quest to obtain the CCIE certification and are in need of re-enforcing solid networking practices.
There are a few chapters that I found particularly helpful. The first chapter that covers the Catalyst 3550 gives some really good insight into the capabilities of this widely deployed switch. Anyone that has a wide deployment of Catalyst 3550's would find this chapter useful in unlocking the switches potential. Some other really good chapters are the three chapters that cover Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). The BGP chapters make up about 30% of the book and the authors have done an excellent job at communicating several of the many challenges when working with BGP. BGP is so well documented in this book that it make a great reference on the topic.
The book comes with a CD that contains some practice labs and configurations that would be helpful to know when studying for the CCIE Routing and Switching Lab. Most of the practice labs require several lab devices in order to replicate the environment in an actual lab. The labs have a good variety of technology challenges. Probably not the same caliber as the real CCIE lab, but good practice none-the-less. The CD also contains software that can be used for terminal emulation services. The software looks really nice. I believe most of the packages can send a break to the terminal, which is very useful when attempting to get to the ROMMON prompt for tasks such as password recovery.
Overall this book is a nice compliment to the many resources required when studying for the CCIE exam.

I am a multiple CCIE looking for all around knowledge of subjects, including the multiple topics listed in this book. Having read the first volume in the series, I wanted to learn the tips and tricks of the authors. I can honestly say that
although this book is good and worth the read, it was not as good as the first book. There are also much better books
to read on some of the topics listed in this book (see Halabi & Parkhurst for BGP) but the authors do add good examples to their explanations.

The best part of the book is the route-filtering and the queuing chapters. The switching chapter wasn't all that bad either with a deep dive into Spanning Tree as well as the features of the 3550. I was impressed with the output of the show/debug commands which shows us that the authors actually tested their configurations and allows the reader to follow along even if they don't have real gear to test the scenarios out.

Some of the material in the book was extraneous and felt a little like filler when reading it (the chapters on ATM and the Switching modes) but those were easily outdone by the BGP topic scenarios.

The full scale labs at the end of the book were really good and tested potential candidates on core areas and would give candidates an accurate account of the type of scenarios they should know for the real world.

Karl Solie and Leah Lynch's "CCIE Practical Studies, Volume II" (ISBN: 1587050722, Cisco Press) is a valuable addition to the CCIE candidate's arsenal of study materials, and provides new perspective on foundational topics, while diving deeper into more obscure areas. This second volume allows the authors to move beyond the core suite of CCIE required knowledge (e.g., Frame Relay, IGP's, PPP) in order to explore in practical ways the other key study areas. The book covers six major categories:

* Advanced Ethernet Switching with the Catalyst 3550
* Route Maps & Policy Based Routing
* Multicast Routing
* Router Performance Management - ATM, Switching Modes ,Compression
* QoS - Intserv, Diffserv, Rate Limiting, Queuing
* BGP-4

The book offers insight for all reader experience levels -- from those in the early stages of CCIE lab preparation to the advanced readers who are fine tuning their lab skills. At either end of the spectrum, this book serves as a complimentary volume and should be read along with the other suite of CCIE absolute "must reads" (e.g., Doyle's "Routing TCP/IP, Vols.1,2", Halabi's "Internet Routing Architectures"). Solie and Lynch's second volume's value is how it offers just enough theory to keep the novice going, but not so much as to overly repeat what has already been extensively written about. This same concept of minimal overlap extends past the theory and into the content and practice labs. Even though much of what is explored has been covered in other books, Solie and Lynch frame the material in a different way and offer numerous, helpful examples. In addition, each major category spends at least some time exploring concepts that have not historically been well documented. A simple example of this is how the authors provide real examples of how and when to use the ORIGIN attribute to filter BGP routes. Where previously other authors only provided conceptual details of the ORIGIN attribute, Solie and Lynch give practical examples of how it actually works and how you can manipulate BGP routing with it. In addition to exploring unfamiliar concepts, the strength of the book is in how the authors explain concepts in a simple manner and reinforce those ideas with easy to understand illustrations and multiple hands-on lab examples (assuming you have equipment to use). The book ends with five CCIE mock labs, with a companion CD that has the configs and solutions for the lab, as well as terminal emulation software. Strangely enough, considering that the book spends so much time covering QoS and BGP especially, the five CCIE labs do not really push the technical difficulty limits for these categories.

There are only a few drawbacks to this book. The chapter on the Catalyst 3550 could have benefited by cutting out the spanning-tree and trunking theory (much of which was simply duplicated from the first volume), and spending more time on other practical examples of advanced configuration (e.g. 802.1X, IP phone port configuration). Each chapter afterwards, however, seemed to get better than the previous. One minor point of frustration is the periodic errors found in the diagrams provided (e.g. wrong IP addresses, etc.). A few diagrams in the BGP section are not legible due to printing errors, but an errata was released to correct that problem and can be found online at ciscopress.com. For the most part, however, these drawbacks are only minor compared to the value of the overall book. Lastly, although not necessarily a fault in itself, as a compilation of various technologies, the book is not capable of going into fine detail in each of its categories and leaves the reader wanting for more examples and labs. Hence the reason this book must be considered a complimentary piece to the overall CCIE's library and not just a standalone work (not that there really is one). People looking for a single book to prepare them for the CCIE lab exam will be disappointed with this book, as they will with any other book.

"CCIE Practical Studies, Volume II" is an excellent resource for CCIE lab candidates. Additionally, it is a helpful resource to network professionals in general as it provides valuable and "real world" applicable knowledge of routing and switching.