CCNA Security 210-260 Certification Guide: Build your knowledge of network security and pass your CCNA Security exam (210-260)

I just finished reading the book cover-to-cover. I will admit this book does a very great job with the picture illustrations and breaking down the concepts in CCNA Security concepts. I came from reading books from Cisco Press, and I believe they(Cisco Press) goes in so much detail that they complicate some of the concepts.Where this book fell short was probably the organization of the chapter breakdown. At times I felt the book was written going off of the author(s) train of thought and wrote it down as it was coming to them, it was very lackluster and at times I felt like I had to go back or forward to the chapter that did explain some of the concepts such as IDS/IPS. Another thing that I noticed that was missing was when the author(s) would talk about a concept, but not go into detail or forgot some of the details. An example would be when the book was explaining how to secure Layer 2 devices. In short the author(s) should had started with port-security then moved on to dhcp snooping, dynamic arp inspection and ip source guard. I mention this because this is like a pyramid, where the basic and most used idea will be at the bottom and everything else builds upon it when you are on the device's CLI (Command Line Interface). One particular part that was missed was loop guard on Layer 2 devices. Another was EAP and the other variants used for authenticating a user, such as EAP-FASTv1,EAP-FASTv2, EAP-LEAP,EAP-TLS and SEIM Technology and lastly MAC Authentication Bypass(MAB).In short I know this looks like I'm complaining about the shortcomings of the book, but do not be fooled, I greatly appreciate some of the author(s) insight and perspective on concepts that I read from Cisco Press that felt overwhelming to something that was broken down into an easy to understand concept. I acknowledge that this is a guide and like most guides they cannot cover every aspect related in CCNA Security because the rest comes from the reader to have either the experience from working or having the actual equipment to tinker with. Either way this is a great book overall and it gives you the basic concepts that you are required to know and you may need to find other books to go deeper into the concepts. I know this because I have read other security books to prepare myself for the exam and in each new book it is a review, but I also gain knowledge in areas that were covered.

I finished the book. It was a quick read and very superficial. Organization was a little haphazard and it is obivious that the authors and the editors don't have any kind of training in education because there were a few places that clearly could have been improved upon to help flow and understanding. My biggest gripe is that a vast majority of the book that had labs, they could not be done with packet tracer. I don't have GNS3 and no a real lab so I had to skip a lot of chapters because it was worthless for me until I put an actual physical lab together. I have now bought the cisco press book and will edit this review now that I have a baseline.

I love the book. I'm an extremely binary person, but I'll be the first one to say I'm much better with numbers and mathematics than I am at reading. Due to this, for both ICND1 and ICND2 I was unable to read the Cisco Press books because they were flat out too challenging of a read for me. This book however is great because its straight to the point, very informative, and very simplistic. Easy to understand what the writer is trying to convey.I'm only about 20% into my CCNA: Security studies, so I can't state whether or not this book covers all the exam objectives. That said, what I have read so far is great information and delivered in a great writing style. I think at 20$ (kindle version) it’s a no brainer.

This book does not provide enough information for you to pass the certification exam. Use this as a supplement to a primary source. Sadly, this is the better of a short list of bad options.The book has some editing issues. I found multiple examples of before and after pictures being mixed up, out of order, or two after pictures being used. I also found that the order of the information being presented is sometimes random or out of order. There is a chapter where two dissimilar topics are being presented and midway through the second topic it immediately jumps back into the first topic. I also found several sections that were repeated almost word for word in other parts of the book and this didn’t appear to be an intentional review.There are no after the chapter tests and the summaries are so high level they are worthless. There is also no online content to include practice tests, flash cards, labs, etc. The labs inside of the book are not really helpful because they don’t explain what is going on. The authors also try to hide the fact that they don’t cover all the content by not providing each exam objective is covered in each chapter or even the book covers.At the time of publishing, educationally, only one out of the four authors/editors holds any certification higher than Cisco ICND1. Yes, only one author holds the CCNA Security and CCNA R&S. No education is listed for any of the four authors/editors so you can’t even tell if they graduated high school. This might help explain why none of the sources of their information is cited back to Cisco documents or to other authors.

After finishing this book and sitting for the exam (which I passed), I feel there is a large amount of content that is either missed or not gone into detail on with this book. I think it is a decent introduction to the material, but not a thorough coverage of all topics. If you are new to Cisco/network security, this is a good primer before reading the OCG (which also leaves out details).

The grammatical errors more than likely caused Webster to turn over in his grave....... Tried to use as a reference, but would up giving to a homeless person as insulation...

Good book but not sure it covers 100% of CCNA Security exam. I saw some of dump and I found some questions that does not covered by this book. It is good book and I would say it covers 85% of CCNA security. Still good book to understand Network Security.

The content in this book is helpful as a review, but the writing sometimes seemed awkward and the technical content included some errors. I did pass the exam but can't give much credit to this book since much of the exam scope was not covered here.