Cisco Press Lab Books - worth it?

kingpinofdiskskingpinofdisks Member Posts: 25 ■□□□□□□□□□
in CCNP
I am thinking about clicking the 'check-out' button for 3 Cisco Press Lab books from amazon - they look awfully tempting, mainly because I only have 15 BCSI labs and maybe 5 switching labs right now.

Anyone think they are worth $100+ of my precious cash (currently unemployed)?
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Comments

  • wat08wat08 Member Posts: 128
    If the reviews on Amazon are good I'd say go for it.
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  • JohnDouglasJohnDouglas Member Posts: 186
    I'm working through the bsci lab portfolio now. I think it's good although the pages of ping results get a bit wearing. Can't vouch for the other books. I think I read the ONT book was a little thin. Perhaps they truncated the ping results?
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  • kingpinofdiskskingpinofdisks Member Posts: 25 ■□□□□□□□□□
    I just got them.

    I figure the structured labs will be good to organize my rack rental time, but more importantly, it should be easy to expand each lab in size and complexity.

    The 'pods' at the last class I audited were shared between 2 students each. The pods had 2 switches and 4 routers. If the lab books are similar, I will simply double the size of each lab (up to 8 routers / 4 switches) and double the complexity (where applicable) to get decent results.

    'Decent Results' includes using the labs as a starting point for real-world scenarios. For the ISCW, I didn't just setup 2 routers with a VPN tunnel. I setup 8 routers in a partial-mesh network, with NHRP, OSPF, GRE, IPSec, and proper metrics. I will just do similar things for the rest.
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