CCSP: Cisco Certified Security Professional Certification All-in-One Exam Guide (Exams SECUR,CSPFA, CSVPN, CSIDS, and CSI)

Rating:
Summary: Fair, considering the competition
Review: I've used four CCSP-related books in preparing for teaching the CCSP subject material, and have found none of them completely up to the task. The All-In-One covers the SECUR and CSPFA material reasonably well, though starts to fall down with CSVPN and is mediocre at best for CSIDS. CSI? Well that gets all of four pages of bullet points reprinted from the official Cisco exam content and the recommendation to go and read the free Cisco SAFE whitepapers.

As with all CCSP books, much of the text is borrowed (some might say plagiarised, given no referencing is used) from the official Cisco documentation. Picking a page pretty much at random: p 466 discusses Split Tunnelling for the VPN 3000 Concentrator; the text here is a lightly edited copy from the (free) Cisco VPN 3000 Config Guide, rel 4.1, p 271 (13.35).

This book has many factual and editorial errors (e.g. picking random examples from my annotations: figures in Chapter 24 are all off-by-one, IP addresses given in screen grabs in Chapter 15 are incorrect; the description of HMAC on p. 292 confuses the shared key with a private key) to the point that causes the reader to question the validity of the material (perhaps this is intentional to force students to check everything!). Even some of the copied Cisco documentation has errors introduced: e.g. the diagrams of the IDS architecture in Chapter 24 are incorrect when compared to the original Cisco documentation, and the text. Pretty much all of Chapter 25 (CSIDS) is out of date and no longer relevant to the current (2004) exams. As of March 2004, the publisher's web site has not released any errata.

The material covering the SECUR and CSPFA exams is about 80-90% of what you'll need to review to prepare for those exams; for the remaining 10-20% and for the other exams you WILL need to refer to other references (i.e. the Cisco documentation). For CSIDS and CSI, this book will be of very little help.

Having said all of the above, I can vouch for this book being about the best of a bad bunch. None of the competing books seem to be any better!

Rating:
Summary: The best book
Review: The CCSP all in one is The best books I have read by far covering all the important objectives covering Cisco Security. The book covers 3.6 auto-initiation very clear and I was able to pass the CSVPN easily. The book takes a no-nonsense approach and I will find myself using it as an excellent reference now and in the future. Well written and easy to understand if you are preparing for the CCSP, you need to include this as a must.

Rating:
Summary: Not a good book for Exam Guide, maybe reference
Review: This book, while obviously having loads of information, is not as helpful as its price should indicate. I found many small typos throughout the book, and there are numerous times that I found actually incorrect information. After studying this book very heavily, I found that it only mentioned about two-thirds of what I actually found on the test (CSPFA 642-521). When I took the test, I was completely surprised by much of the information. The packaged test in the book is really just a test on the book itself, and does not represent the actual test very well (CSPFA 642-521). This book does have a lot of information, and can be used as a study guide, but I would absolutely recommend buying another book to supplement it, or taking a course.