Foreword

In today's world of networking, mission-critical networks are being designed for data, voice, and video. Due to different traffic patterns and the quality of service required by each type of information, solid hands-on experience is imperative for managing, designing, and troubleshooting these networks.

Attaining a strong degree of hands-on experience translates into in-depth understanding of the concepts, scalability, and deployment issues of today's networks. Such experience also builds the expertise to analyze traffic patterns and the knowledge of when, where, and how to apply protocol and bandwidth features to enhance performance.

To help further your hands-on experience, Cisco Press is publishing the CCIE Professional Development series of books. Books in this series will significantly help your understanding of protocol concepts, and they provide real-world examples and case studies to strengthen the theoretical concepts examined. I highly recommend that you use these books as a hands-on learning tool by duplicating the examples and case studies using Cisco products. You can even take this further by tweaking the configuration parameters to see which changes each network goes through by using the extensive debugging features provided in each Cisco product.

In the first book of the CCIE Professional Development series, CCIE Professional Development: Routing TCP/IP, Volume I , Jeff Doyle does a fantastic job of building the TCP/IP concepts, from IP address classes to analyzing protocol metrics. Each chapter contains examples, network topologies with IP addresses, packet analysis, and Cisco debugging outputs. In my opinion, the best parts are the case studies, in which Jeff compares different features of the protocol by using more or less the similar topology. This generates a strong understanding of the protocol concepts and features.

I recommend CCIE Professional Development: Routing TCP/IP, Volume I for any networking certification, and I believe that it also makes an excellent university networking course book.

Imran Qureshi

CCIE Program Manager