How to Prepare for an Exam

Preparing for any Cisco- related test (including Exam 642-501) requires that you obtain and study materials designed to provide comprehensive information about the product and its capabilities that will appear on the specific exam for which you are preparing. The following list of materials can help you study and prepare:

• Benjamin, Henry. CCIE Security Exam Certification Guide (CCIE Self-Study) . Indianapolis, Indiana: Cisco Press, 2003.

• Malik, Saadat. Network Security Principles and Practices (CCIE Professional Development) . Indianapolis, Indiana: Cisco Press, 2002.

• The exam-preparation advice, practice tests, questions of the day, and discussion groups on the http://www.examcram2.com e-learning and certification destination Web site.

In addition, you might find any or all of the following materials useful in your quest for Cisco Certification expertise:

• Study guides ” Several publishers ”including Que Publishing ”offer certification titles. Que Publishing offers the following:

  • The Exam Cram 2 series ” These books give you information about the material you need to know to pass the tests.

  • The Cisco Certification series ” These books provide a greater level of detail than the Exam Cram 2 books and are designed to teach you everything you need to know about the subject covered by an exam. Each book comes with a CD-ROM that contains interactive practice exams in a variety of testing formats.

  Together, these two series make a perfect pair.

• Classroom training ” Online partners and third-party training companies offer classroom training on Cisco products. These companies aim to help you prepare to pass Exam 642-501 (or other exams). Although such training runs upward of $350 per day in class, most of the individuals lucky enough to partake find this training to be quite worthwhile. Besides the classroom training, you get the hands-on experience by doing lab exercises. A good instructor's insight is always a huge benefit in classroom training. As instructors, we understand the value and importance of effective training.

• Other publications ” There's no shortage of materials available about Cisco security certification track. The "Need to Know More?" resource sections at the end of each chapter in this book give you an idea of where we think you should look for further discussion.

• Cisco documentation regarding different topics could be very useful in your study. For more information visit http://www.cisco.com. Request for Comment articles (RFCs) will be helpful for a detailed understanding of the standards. For more information visit http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html.

This set of required and recommended materials represents an unparalleled collection of resources about the Cisco security track and related topics.

What This Book Will not Do

This book will not teach you everything you need to know about computers or even about a given topic. Nor is this book an introduction to computer technology. If you're new to applications development and looking for an initial preparation guide, check out http://www.quepublishing.com, where you will find a whole section dedicated to the Cisco certifications. This book reviews what you need to know before you take the test, with the fundamental purpose dedicated to reviewing the information on the Cisco 642-501 certification exam.

This book uses a variety of teaching and memorization techniques to analyze the exam-related topics and provides you with ways to input, index, and retrieve everything you'll need to know to pass the test. Once again, it is not an introduction to application development.

What This Book Is Designed to Do

This book is designed to be read as a pointer to the areas of knowledge you will be tested on. In other words, you might want to read the book one time, just to get an insight into how comprehensive your knowledge of computers is. The book is also designed to be read shortly before you go for the actual test and to give you a distillation of the entire field of securing Cisco IOS networks in as few pages as possible. We think you can use this book to get a sense of the underlying context of any topic in the chapters ”or to skim-read for Exam Alerts, bulleted points, summaries, and topic headings.

We've drawn on material from the Cisco list of knowledge requirements, from other preparation guides, and from the exams themselves . We've also drawn from a battery of third-party test-preparation tools and technical Web sites as well as from our own experience with application development and the exam. Our aim is to walk you through the knowledge you will need ”looking over your shoulder, so to speak ”and point out those things that are important for the exam (Exam Alerts, practice questions, and so on).

The 642-501 exam makes a basic assumption that you already have a strong background with the Cisco internetworking technologies and its terminology. On the other hand, because the Cisco security track is so new, no one can be a complete expert. We've tried to demystify the jargon, acronyms, terms, and concepts. Also, wherever we think you're likely to blur past an important concept, we've defined the assumptions and premises behind that concept.