CCDA/CCDP Flash Cards and Exam Practice Pack
Reviewer Name: Alan Sardella, Consultant
Reviewer Certifications: CCNA, CCDA, CCDP
Rating: ***** out of *****
CCDA/CCDP Flash Cards and Exam Practice Pack by Anthony Sequeira and Kevin Wallace (Cisco Press, 2004) delivers on what it promises: solid final preparation materials for the CCDA (DESGN 640-861) and CCDP (ARCH 642-871) exams. If you have studied the basic exam material for these exams you are ready to burn in your knowledge using this book. For the CCDA, preliminary preparation means reading the CCDA Exam Certification Guide and/or CCDA Self-Study: Designing for Cisco Internetwork Solutions (DESGN) book for the DESGN topics. Both of these are now available from Cisco Press. Unfortunately, there are no corresponding books for the ARCH topics, so you need to take a more creative course, such as perusing the SRND guides on Cisco's web site for topics such as storage, wireless, VPN, content, and telephony, while keeping the exam objectives (listed on Cisco's web site) in the back of your mind. Overall, I would rate this book a 5 (out of 5), with the strong caveat that it will be difficult to pass the exams unless you do a significant amount of outside research, especially in the case of CCDP ARCH.
In making the design track more relevant to the current networking scene, Cisco replaced (in 2003) the old CCDA course with one that focused much more on cogent design practices, such as identifying the technical and business goals and constraints put forth in Priscilla Oppenheimer's Top-Down Network Design. They also dropped old technologies like IPX and AppleTalk and replaced these rarely used protocols with forward-looking material like IP telephony, modern security issues like IP spoofing and DDoS mitigation, and the enterprise composite network model, which further breaks down the familiar access, distribution, and core layers into an enterprise campus (which includes submodules for network management and the server), an enterprise edge (with separate Internet connectivity and e-commerce modules, along with a remote access and WAN module), and a service provider edge.
Similarly, the CCDP ARCH course was upgraded (also in 2003), with a deeper focus on all of the above areas, and a much deeper treatment of QoS options for voice and data, specifics on multicast features such as sparse and dense mode operations and shared versus source distribution trees, details on the CiscoWorks network management tools including LAN Management Services and Routed WAN Management System, content caching, routing and switching, and storage essentials including NAS and SAN. In most cases the ARCH course drills deeper than the DESGN course; in some, such as IP Telephony, the DESGN course seems to deal with the lower-level issues (such as tip and ring) while ARCH deals with applications (such as Call Manager configurations including single-site, multisite, and clustering over the WAN).
The examples in CCDA/CCDP Flash Cards and Exam Practice Pack are very easy to understand and the flash cards follow the quick reference sheets quite faithfully. The illustrations are excellent and the practice questions (available on the accompanying CD-ROM) are highly relevant. The authors have delivered exactly what should be expected for this type of book; they are both certified Cisco Systems instructors with KnowledgeNet and clearly know their stuff.
By the time you're acing all the topics in the Flash Cards book (when preparing for CCDP, I went back over CCDA), you're ready to make an educated guess on anything that isn't obvious. There were still a few surprises in the exam but this book definitely helped me muddle through. I would assume the CCDP ARCH will be an easier nut to crack when Cisco Press releases a Self-Study Guide, currently slated for November 2004.