CCNP ISCW Official Exam Certification Guide

• Master all 642-825 exam topics with the official study guide

• Assess your knowledge with chapter-opening quizzes

• Review key concepts with foundation summaries

• Practice with hundreds of exam questions on the CD-ROM

Brian Morgan, CCIE® No. 4865

Neil Lovering, CCIE No. 1772

CCNP ISCW Official Exam Certification Guide is a best of breed Cisco® exam study guide that focuses specifically on the objectives for the Implementing Secure Converged Wide Area Networks exam (642-825 ISCW). Successfully passing the ISCW 642-825 exam certifies that you have the knowledge and skills necessary to secure and expand the reach of an enterprise network to teleworkers and remote sites with focus on securing remote access and VPN client configuration.

CCNP ISCW Official Exam Certification Guide follows a logical organization of the CCNP® ISCW exam objectives. Material is presented in a concise manner, focusing on increasing your retention and recall of exam topics. You can organize your exam preparation through the use of the consistent features in these chapters. “Do I Know This Already?” quizzes open each chapter and allow you to decide how much time you need to spend on each section. Exam topic lists and concise Foundation Summary information make referencing easy and give you a quick refresher whenever you need it. Challenging chapter-ending review questions help you assess your knowledge and reinforce key concepts.

The companion CD-ROM contains a powerful testing engine that allows you to focus on individual topic areas or take complete, timed exams. The assessment engine also tracks your performance and provides feedback on a topic-by-topic basis, presenting question-by-question remediation to the text. Well regarded for its level of detail, assessment features, and challenging review questions and exercises, this book helps you master the concepts and techniques that can enable you to succeed on the exam the first time.

Brian Morgan, CCIE® No. 4865, is a consulting systems engineer for Cisco, specializing in Unified Communications technologies. He services a number of Fortune 500 companies in architectural, design, and support roles. With more than 15 years in the networking industry, he served as director of engineering for a large telecommunications company, is a certified Cisco instructor teaching at all levels, from basic routing and switching to CCIE lab preparation, and spent a number of years with IBM Network Services serving many of IBM’s largest clients. He is a former member of the ATM Forum and a long-time member of the IEEE.

Neil Lovering, CCIE No. 1772, works as a design consultant for Cisco. Neil has been with Cisco for more than three years and works on large-scale government networking solutions projects. Prior to Cisco, Neil was a network consultant and instructor for more than eight years and worked on various routing, switching, dialup, and security projects for many customers all over North America.

This official study guide helps you master all the topics on the CCNP ISCW exam, including

• The Cisco hierarchical network model as it pertains to the WAN

• Teleworker configuration and access with broadband technologies

• Frame mode MPLS

• IPsec VPN implementations

• Cisco device hardening

• Cisco IOS® Firewall features

• Cisco IOS Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) features

Companion CD-ROM

The CD-ROM contains an electronic copy of the book and more than 200 practice questions for the ISCW exam, which are all available in study mode, test mode, and flash card format.

This volume is part of the Exam Certification Guide Series from Cisco Press®. Books in this series provide officially developed exam preparation materials that offer assessment, review, and practice to help Cisco Career Certification candidates identify weaknesses, concentrate their study efforts, and enhance their confidence as exam day nears.

Category: Cisco Certification

Covers: CCNP ISCW Exam 642-825

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 7 Ratings

Better than nothing, but not enough for the exam - 2009-08-24
Reviewer Rating:
As I've found to be typical w/ Cisco's Exam Certification series, there simply is not enough information to use this as your only study source. I took the exam last week and passed: 915/1000, however it was only because I used TWO other study sources [the lab book and CBT videos]. Cable and DSL theory was explained well, however the PPPoE configurations given were INCORRECT. I have an 871-K9 running 12.4(9)T4 using ATT DSL and thus requires PPPoE w/ PAP authentication. "pppoe enable" will NOT work, it is an incomplete command. You need "pppoe enable group global" in order for the connection to form. Furthermore you need the command "ppp authentication pap CALLIN." [They neglected the CALLIN portion of the command.] MPLS coverage was well explained HOWEVER they FAIL to discuss VRF and the syntax to configure this. NOTE: I had -three- questions on this subject. I liked the IPSec section, and site-to-site IMO is probably the most important subject on the exam for real-world application; they did a decent job explaining IPSec operations and CLI/SDM configuration. The IPSec GRE section left a little to be desired. As far as the test is concerned I personally had a "scenario" based question. Be sure you can troubleshoot GRE configurations, typically by looking for mismatched source/destination IP's or subnet masks. The section covering the various security features [router hardening, AAA, ACL's, CBAC/IOS Firewall, and IPS] were covered well enough to pass the exam; however in the real world you'll probably need to dig a little deeper. I suggest going to Cisco's website and downloading the 12.4T IOS Security Configuration Guide. Cisco no longer uses the "inspect" syntax for CBAC, but has switched to zone-based firewalls. Futhermore 128mb.sdf and 256mb.sdf are no longer used or updated. They have switched to the v.5 signature format. THE BOTTOM LINE: if you want to pass this test you'll need to also purchase the ISCW Lab Portfolio [excellent book by the way]. Be comfortable looking through IPSec and Firewall configs on SDM, and configuring DSL & AAA access. You should know the config commands cold.

Better than the others - 2009-07-12
Reviewer Rating:
I used this book along with the lab portfolio for the ISCW exam. Both of these books should be enough to get you through. I did find myself browsing Cisco's site to find other configuration examples, because the other doesn't always explain the configuration options well.

I do have to say that this book is better than the Exam Certification Guide for the BSCI. The BSCI book was extremely lacking and wasn't enough to study, which left a lot to be desired. But the ISCW book is a little bit better.

"Master all the exam topics" ... not really - 2009-06-24
Reviewer Rating:
One of the bullets in the product description says:
- Master all 642-825 exam topics with the official study guide

Unfortunately, it doesn't help you master "ALL" the topics. As the earlier poster has pointed out you'll have to use varied sources, like MPLS for example. Good thing my company sponsors for Safari Online because with that I managed to read MPLS Fundamentals also from Cisco Press. The questionnaires that comes with the CD, as with the rest of it's kind, leaves more to be desired. I wonder when they will truly update that test simulator stuff!

Other than that it's still a good read. I liked the device hardening section/chapter. The VPN is also good. And if you're self-studying just like me I would also recommend picking up the ISCW Lab portolio, too, as it helps you to structure your studies.

I think this book more of stimulates your curiosity about other networking related technologies out there.

One final tip, I'm studying this as my final paper for my CCNP certification. Regardless of what they say wherein you could start off with any of the papers for your certification, based from my experience I really recommend that you start off with BSCI -> ISCW -> ONT -> BCMSN. Hopefully, this tip could help anyone especially those coming out of their CCNA and starting off CCNP.

HTH!

Expected more - 2009-03-25
Reviewer Rating:
If you're thinking about this test you should have some experience because the book itself doesn't help to pass it.

As another reader mentioned some topics are mentioned lightly. My previous experience in some topics helped me when I took the test, but neither the questions in the book or in the CD helped too much. The book is decent and gives a good insight. It is also well written but be prepared to have other sources and some experience or training with a good simulator. (I always recommend Dynamips/Dynagen)

ISCW - 2009-02-14
Reviewer Rating:
Excellent. I recommend this book for all IT guys. Clear topic and good source of information.

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