I'd worked with a variety of Cisco equipment, both WAN routers and LAN switches and L3 switch/routers over the past six years and I found the PIX security model and command set somewhat confusing, so I bought this book because it was the only book about the PIX that I could find.
Boy, was I disappointed -- confusing examples, outdated information, missing information, non-relevant filler, this book couldn't have gottten much worse.
The book assumes through almost all the examples that you will be NAT translating your addresses, and spends most of its time explaining configurations that use NAT and almost no time with non-NAT configurations. It's left to the reader to guess at whether commands like "static" even apply to non-nat connections.
Cisco themselves in at least PIX 6.1(1) have deprecated the conduit and outbound commands in favor of access-group and access-list commands. For a book with a copyright of 2002 and written by cisco, there is no mention of access-list/group commands at all and all the examples use conduit/outbound -- this is inexcusable.
There was also no mention in the book of the poorly documented process for updating licensing keys for the PIX, either. This would have been a valuable, step-by-step addition. PIX hardware was absent from any discussion in this book as well.
Furthermore, there's an entire chapter devoted IOS firewall commands, which, while a nice freebie, seems like it was thrown in to bulk up a pretty thin book.
I suppose I got something out of reading the book, but certainly not the book's asking price. I've found the usual online docs at Cisco more valuable, especially for 6.1(1).
