Introduction

Welcome to the BSCI Exam Cram 2 . This book is intended to prepare you to take and pass the Cisco BSCI Certification Exam 642-801, as administered by both the Prometric and Pearson VUE testing organizations. This Introduction explains Cisco's BSCI certification program in general and talks about how the Exam Cram 2 series can help you prepare for that certification exam. You can learn more about Prometric by visiting its Web site at www.prometric.com, and you can learn more about Pearson VUE by visiting its Web site at www.vue.com.

Exam Cram 2 books help you understand and appreciate the subjects and materials you need to pass certification exams. Exam Cram 2 books are aimed strictly at test preparation and review. They do not teach you everything you need to know about a topic. Instead, the series presents and dissects the questions and problems that you're likely to encounter on a test. In preparing this book, we've worked from preparation guides and tests and from a battery of third-party test-preparation tools. The aim of the Exam Cram 2 series is to bring together as much information as possible about the certification exams.

Nevertheless, to completely prepare yourself for any test, we recommend that you begin by taking the Self-Assessment immediately following this Introduction. This tool will help you evaluate your knowledge base against the requirements for the Cisco BSCI exam under both ideal and real circumstances.

Based on what you learn from that exercise, you might decide to begin your studies with some classroom training, or to pick up and read one of the many study guides available from third-party vendors , including Cisco Press certification titles. We also strongly recommend that you spend as much time as feasible configuring, optimizing, and monitoring within the Cisco IOS as well as deploying the various BSCI routing protocols in a real-world or test environment on actual Cisco routing devices.