Building Scalable Cisco Networks: Prepare for CCNP and CCDP Certification with the Official Cisco BSCN Coursbook

Author: Catherine Paquet, Diane Teare List Price: $60.00 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 1578702283 Publisher: Cisco Press (15 January, 2000) Edition: Hardcover Average Customer Rating: 4.4 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

The organization of OSPF material has the following drawbacks: a) lack of context, the commands are covered only after some theory is given in a dry definition form. This is great, you may say, but to me it was not easy to put the definitions into context. The material for OSPF is mostly from the Cisco OSPF Design Guide (read those skimpy pages to get the most understanding of OSPF). So it looks like from the OSPF design guide, they seperated the theory and interspersed it with some other text and moved the configuration towards the chapter end. The second OSPF chapter requires serious apology to the readers: inter area routing and external routing are impossible to describe and make students understand without introducing redistribution(this is introduced only at the end). However, this makes the material extremely difficult to understand.

EIGRP is OK.

BGP is another complex set of definitions, and several reads are needed before even trying to piece together the definition and understand how to put everything together.

So: for OSPF start from OSPF design guide by Cisco. Not sure about where to go for EIGRP and BGP: I got a hang of those material by several reads of the Paquet and Teare material.

I also believe that it would be a mistake to judge this book against a benchmark it wasn't designed for, hence, I'll confine my comments and rating from perspective 1.

The authors have done a good job with the topics presented in the book. I would recommend this book to anyone who is considering studying for the CCNP/CCIP certification and doesn't know where to begin. That said, I would suggest you look below at the list of books and testing software I found useful and necessary to prepare for the BSCI test.

Base guide: This book
Supplement for IS-IS: Lammel's BSCI book
MUST REFERENCES: Jeff Doyle's Vol 1 and 2
Testing software: Companion CD with Lammel's book, and Boson BSCI exam #2.

A few words about the test itself and how I fared. The test was tougher than I had anticipated. I say tough because, I felt that the questions and the choices were loosely worded to leave me with some doubt of my choices. So far, I've always completed the tests in somewhere between half and two-thirds the time-limit, however, it took me almost the allotted duration to complete this exam. To be candid, I felt I got lucky to have scored 907.

Note: Perhaps this review might be put in a better perspective if I said, that I've been away from hands-on experience with networks for the last five months. Prior to the break, I had worked in the internetworking industry for about five years(effectively) out of six.

I wish the best of luck to other pursuers!

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