CCSP: Secure PIX and Secure VPN Study Guide (642-521 and 642-511)

Security's something you can sell these days. It's fair to say that even as a lot of the once-hot certifications (CCNA, MCSE, and others) have been devalued, the security-related ratings have become more marketable. CCSP: Secure PIX and Secure VPN teaches you what you need to know in order to pass the two big Cisco-specific security exams. As always, you'll want to have the actual hardware on hand to help you learn. Having this book at your side, however, makes the learning process less of a scattershot affair and more of a properly directed enterprise.

Though sections in which the authors guide you through configuration wizards' steps add little to the wizards' simplified processes, coverage of the command-line interface should prove helpful during learning and study (the coverage amounts to directed exploration of the environment, which is always good for comprehension and retention). Theory coverage--complete with lots of network schematics, many of which appear on Cisco exams--helps boost your ability to diagnose and repair problems on your own. Some readers may consider the illustrations too large (it's not unusual for a simple dialog box to fill half a page), but everyone will like the labs. These give an instruction ("Create an IKE policy on PIX1 that uses preshared keys") and then, on the next page, give the explicit command-line syntax that does the required job. --David Wall

Topics covered: The published objectives of the two most popular data-security exams from Cisco Systems: Certified Secure PIX Firewall Administrator (CSPFA -- 642-521) and Certified Secure Virtual Private Network (CSVPN -- 642-511). For both subjects, coverage has more to do with administration and everyday config-modification than with network design and initial setup.