Cisco Secure PIX Firewalls

Simply put, Cisco Secure PIX Firewalls fills a market need. No other book on the market covers Cisco firewall hardware to the extent this one does. Indeed, no other book covers the Cisco Secure PIX products exclusively. Regardless of whether you aspire to earn a Cisco security certification or take the Cisco Secure PIX Firewall Advanced (CSPFA) class for which this is the official textbook, you'll benefit from the authors' treatment of their subject. Relatively little of their work is straight documentation of commands and procedures, though there's enough of that to make this book a good reference. Much more attention goes to typical PIX engineering problems, which the authors use as a context for explaining the more mechanical aspects of IOS syntax and configuration files.

There's a fair amount of background information for each covered topic. In the chapter on IPSec, for example, you'll find definitions of key terms and concepts (like RSA signatures and the Diffie-Hellman protocol) and comments on the relative strengths of many of them. Once that's out of the way, the necessary configuration is presented as a series of tasks, many of which include procedures in which some steps involve hands-on work (doing something at the command line) and others center on decisions to be made and policies to be established. Tables of relevant commands, arguments, and options back the steps where they're appropriate. --David Wall

Topics covered: This book deals specifically with the Cisco Secure PIX 506, 515, 520, 525, and 535 units. With respect to those firewalls, the authors show how to configure address translation, accounting, logging, IPSec (virtual private networks--VPNs--particularly), authentication, and SNMP and DHCP services. This is comprehensive Cisco Secure PIX documentation for installers and administrators (and also for hackers, so pay attention).