CCSP Self-Study CCSP Secur Exam Certification Guide is intended for students preparing to take the CNRS exam 642-501 in pursuit for the CCSP certification. The exam has been retired so the book is only good for a network beginner who does not know much about security principles related to Cisco IOS routers, switches and VPN devices.



The book has 21 chapters and it begins by providing the introduction of network security and vulnerabilities as well as the defense in depth concept. It then describes the basic IOS router management and brief explanation on how to secure administrative access to the router followed by the description of authentication, authorization and accounting and its impact on the security posture of a network. The next chapters discuss the features and architectural components of Cisco Secure Access Control server, access list and Cisco IOS firewall functions. The final chapters discuss intrusion detection and VPN.



The book was published in year 2004, even before the 1st generation of the Cisco Integrated Service Routers was released and therefore was very outdated. For example, the book talks about Control-Based Access Control (CBAC) features but did not talk about the Zone-based firewall (ZBF) feature, which was introduced in year 2006. The ZBF provides a better and more straightforward design approach and a greater level of granularity than CBAC.



The book also talks about basic site to site VPN, remote access VPN and Easy VPN technologies. Now we have more complex VPN technologies such as Group Encrypted Transport VPN and Dynamic Multipoint VPN. The present Cisco routers also have IOS Content Filtering and Cisco IOS IPS capabilities. The book only mentions about Cisco IDS feature.



I rate this book 2 out of 5 stars since many of the contents are outdated. The book might be a good reading 6 years ago but the readers are better off finding alternative books or reading sources online to get the latest Cisco security technologies. I still give the book two stars since the network beginners and CCNA students still can use this book to learn the basic Cisco network security before moving on to a more advanced reading.