CCNP Security Secure 642-637 Official Cert Guide [Tapa dura]

I knew this was going to be a rough read when the very first sentence of Chapter 1 was a grammatical nightmare, but since it's technical material I set aside my reservations about the quality of the writing and focussed on the technical merits. Sadly, only disappointment lay in that direction as well. Serious and obvious technical errors abound - as an example, the most recent one I read showed a sample configuration which included an access list where the author mistakenly entered a subnet mask rather than a wildcard mask. While the statement is still technically syntactically valid, it would have a very different effect than was described - a clear indication that neither of the authors nor either of the technical reviewers bothered doing anything as basic as actually *testing* the configurations they wrote up prior to publishing. This one is merely an example - additional technical errors can be found in multiple places.

Overall, the book reads as if written by someone whose grasp on the English language is tentative at best, and whose mastery of the subject matter seems questionable. I expected better from Cisco.

Like for first reviewer, I am currently using this book towards by certification exam and find it poorly written and mistake-prone. To properly understand the subject matter and be certain of the accuracy of the information being read, you will have to constantly research other information on the internet. I find myself regularly scouring the Cisco.com support pages for additional information, to explain topics better or deal with mistakes in the book. Should be of a much higher standard.

*** I have since finished this book and while I was hopeful that it would improve as I continued sadly it did not. Without even attempting to find mistakes in the book I was constantly presented with them. While most were typos there were still many technical errors. The amount of typos, though in themselves relatively easy to correct, only made me less confident in the quality of technical material I was reading. One of the most embarrassing errors I found was when doing the "Do I Know This" questions for Chapter 15. When checking the answers in the back of the book, question 3 has the answer as literally "E?" as though not even the writer was not sure and question 7 an answer of "S" when the options presented are A, B, C, D or E. If even these basic things can't be checked and corrected during review what level of confidence is a reader meant to have in the rest of the book.

Another issue I had with the book was that it seemed the CLI commands presented in examples were not entered into and then copied directly from a Cisco device but instead typed directly into the book script and formatted manually as there are many examples of syntax errors and wrong formatting which would not exist if the context was copied directly from a console/SSH session. An example of this is in example 21-10 where the command "ca trust-point MY-TP" is misspelt as "ca trust-poitn MY-TP" and example 20-14 places a hyphen between the words policy and group when this is not the syntax and should be "policy group". Example 17-24 also misses the EIGRP process number from the "no ip next-hop-self" command for example. These are just some of the many syntax errors I found that I believe are a result of this content of the book not being copied from commands first input into a switch or router.

I could go on but basically when a book is marketed as the guide for an exam and endorsed by a company that is not only the exam creator but one of the largest companies in the world the book should be much better than this. This book needs serious work.

I am currently using this book to prepare for the 642-637 exam. I think this book was poorly written. There are so many errors, both technical an non-technical. There are flaws that should not pass through a technical review and remain uncorrected. Yet they did. This makes one to wonder as to what the technical review is all about then. I'll advise anyone who is using this book as an exam prep tool to also use Cisco's documentation on its website. The authors and technical reviewer need to revisit this material.