640-554 Study

bigbenhotness

I keep hearing how Cisco keeps adding stuff for the security exam. I need to take it before Nov 30th, but I want to attempt my first attempt before Nov. I am using CBT nuggets/Cisco book and GNS3. I wonder if this is sufficient? Btw it's my last class to graduate for WGU.

bigbenhotness

anyone?

alan2308

I took and passed the 554 in November 2013. I heard a lot of people say that the book wasn't enough but at that time I don't really remember anything being on the test that I didn't see in the book. However, since I did hear it so often, I did supplement what I was reading in the book with a lot of reading of docs from the Cisco site, so perhaps that is why I didn't feel that anything wasn't covered. I did have access to CBT Nuggets, but I don't know that the videos really contributed. It's the same guy who wrote the book, so it's not like you're seeing anything new or explained much differently.

GNS3 on it's own isn't going to quite cut it when it comes to switching, but IOU integrates well and will suffice. Routing is sufficient whether you use the original Dynamips based router emulation or IOU based emulation. The ASA support in GNS3 is also sufficient as the exam is pretty much all ASDM.

Hondabuff

I'm signed up to take the Boson Bootcamp in two weeks and have grown quite board studying for the test. I have been on the SIMOS material for the past few weeks and some of the other forums caught my eye. The Disk that comes with the CCNA/S book has some pdf's that have CCNP material on it. Looks like Cisco expanded the test pool to include some of this material. The people who are panicking are the dumpers and can only pass the exam by cheating. Some of the people are complaining that they never seen the material but If you do some of the labs, You will encounter the issues. I would watch the cbt's, read the book and the additional pdf's, and do the labs. I have implemented Cisco ACS last year in my company and with the help of cbt's and some YouTube videos I was able to setup parser views through ACS for our NOC techs. Bootcamp is way overkill but we had a training budget to spend and picked CCNA:S for the hell of it.

TechGuru80

It took me around 2 months to read the OCG and watch CBT Nuggets. People seem to take the exam a few times but I thought those were enough. Not sure if you will need new material or not. The wait time is only around a week so you can take it consecutive weeks if needed. When you first try the exam you should have a good idea based on your score if you need way more studying or if you are close.

bigbenhotness

thanks for the replies guys. Will spend this month studying more and see what happens!