About 2 months ago I received from Pearson (via Jamie Adams, @jamieadams76) a hardcover copy of the Official Certification Guide for the CCNP SWITCH test.
Once I got it, I got the feeling that I wasn't going to finish studying this book... seemed to me it was so dense and difficult to understand. But when you get to read and study, it is great and reading is very straightforward.
The book is organized in an orderly-fashioned way. It gets you to understand what type of challenge will you face and the strategy to get though it. I think it is great because you also learn to plan how to study and focus in the most important concepts and ideas.
The "Key Topic" indication is very useful. This indicates that the concepts you are reading are fundamental in the developed topic and must be kept in mind for the test.
I liked also the configuration examples: networking is an applied job and it is necessary to get your hand dirty and enter commands in a console. Best practices are also given.
The author makes special emphasis (at the beginning and at the end of each chapter) in the key commands and concepts. The self assessment questions are useful to test what you know and gives the page number in the book where the answer is. Very intuitive and saves you time in case you don't know the answer.
The CD-ROM provides useful documents, videos and a simulation of some exam-type questions.
I recommend the book as a way to gain knowledge about concepts and get a better idea about protocols and the way they works. Nonetheless I suggest to practice in a real-world switch, creating topologies and developing labs. I believe the concepts get much clearer and understandable as soon as you configure and see the protocol working.
Saturday, 14 May 2011
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