CCSP Cisco Secure PIX Firewall Advanced Exam Certification Guide (CCSP Self-Study) (2nd Edition)

It's a tough market these days for network consultants, but the one commodity there's lots of is fear. There's loads of stuff to be scared of. Which means that canny network experts can get some work by offering to protect computer networks from unauthorized access. It's best to earn a certification before you go touting yourself for work, though. Cisco Systems' Cisco Secure PIX Firewall Advanced (CSPFA) rating is a good vendor-specific one, and is sure to help get you in the door for security work at places with lots of Cisco equipment. CCSP Cisco Secure PIX Firewall Advanced Exam Certification Guide brings you up to speed on the PIX firewall line, with emphasis on the coverage of the CSPFA exam.

Like the other books in the Cisco Press certification line, this one reads like an instructor's lecture, albeit frequently supplemented by reference material (command documentation, for example). The authors begin with material that should be familiar to a Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) or anyone else with basic network grounding, and build from there into the more specialized areas of VPNs, NAT, and access-control lists as they pertain to PIX environments. As always, you'll learn more if you have a testbed PIX firewall on which to try the procedures that appear in the text (the companion CD-ROM holds no simulator, only a quiz program), but this book gives test candidate a great base from which to work. --David Wall

Topics covered: The stated objectives of the two CSPFA exams, one of which candidates must pass in order to earn the Cisco Secure PIX Firewall Advanced (CSPFA) certification. The two exams are 9E0-111 (soon to be retired) and 642-521. Coverage includes PIX firewall installation and configuration, as well as techniques for adding such services as remote access management, virtual private networks (VPNs), network address translation (NAT, and accounting features.

User review
A little outdated now
Good information in here. It's good if you're looking for a cheap way to study. When you upgrade to Pix OS 8 some of the commands are the same, but you implement them at different config levels. You will conf t and then int ethernet0 to configure the interfaces for example. With the older OS it's completely different (which the book contains information for).

I recommend a newer book (or a revision) if you're actually studying for the test.

User review
This book was worthless,,.
Just took the exam and passed - barely. If I hadn't taken the actual Cisco training class I would have failed and this book would have been the prime reason. The exam was MUCH more in depth on a NUMBER of areas that the book did not even being to go deeper then about a paragraph into, if at all. This book was poorly written, difficult to use, the examples were horrible and it CERTAINLY WAS NO USE FOR EXAM PREP - DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK.

The Pix FOS is already pretty unfriendly (compared to IOS) and a book that didn't just show you the help output and then break the option into tables (which looked lifted from CCO) would have been a big help - you know, something with actual explanations of how things are configured an such. This book was nowhere near this and a real disappointment, especially since it's a `Cisco Press` book. What the book turned out to be is was a hack job that was poorly put together, inaccurate, and useless for exam prep - which is horrible since it is marketed as a CCSP `self study guide.` There were even examples that were wrong within the book.

BEWARE.

-Calvin

User review
Fair at best, very poor practice exam
The study guide is only moderately valuable, and sometimes confusing. Worse, the practice exam is sometimes blatantly incorrect.

Example: What kind of protocol is easiest to spoof?
Possible answers: UDP, TCP, ICMP, All protocols, or DNS
The `correct` answer is `TCP is the more difficult to spoof,,.`

I've found a few other errors, making the practice test virtually useless. In the example, the given answer is correct for a different question. In some cases, the answer is actually wrong for the question.

I'm disappointed that an `official` study guide from Cisco Press has so many issues.

User review
Don't waste your time
I can't add much to the comments already posted here, except to support the view that this book is a waste of time and money. It will NOT help you pass the exam. Even if it covered all the material (in my estimation, it omits ~20% of the required curriculum), it still simply copies or paraphrases the (free) Cisco Configuration and Command Reference guides.

At best it's a waste of money, at worst it will give you a false sense of what is required for the exam.

User review
Incomplete and Replete with Errors
The previous reviewer's comment that it's better than nothing is pretty accurate. The book is not organized with the exam objectives in mind, and it appears to have undergone no quality control checks whatsoever. To call some of these mistakes typographical errors is graciously optimistic.

Even the accompanying practice exam was flawed. About 10 minutes into it I got a question whose `correct` answer logically contradicted the parameters of question itself. I'll never know how good or bad the remainder of the exam was, because I immediately uninstalled the program in disgust.

My biggest complaint, however, is that too much material covered on the exam is missing from the book. Sure, the book will get you throught he basics of setting up a PIX firewall, but topics such as the Firewall Services Module, the CiscoWorks Firewall Management Console, and the Auto Update Server are conspicuously absent. And these topics were prevalent on the exam.

With that said, I did pass the exam on the first attempt. But it was thanks to some of the other practice exams and source materials that I was able to make up for the deficiencies and errors in this book. Had I taken this book as gospel, I have no doubt that I would have failed.

I need these study guide books to get me through the CCSP certification, but I am certainly going to avoid anything else by these two authors if possible. Frankly, I'm not sure they understand how some of these technologies (e.g., VPN protocols) really work. They certainly haven't explained them well to me.