CCDA: Cisco Certified Design Associate Study Guide

Interested in the Cisco Certified Design Associate certification? Here's the study guide you need to prepare for it. With full coverage of each official Cisco exam objective, this study guide delivers what you need to know about network-layer addressing, filtering with access lists, using VLANs, and network sizing. You'll learn how to design routed LANs, switched LANs, and routed WANs. The CD includes test-preparation software with hundreds of practice questions.

Of the preparation guides available for the Cisco Certified Design Associate exam (640-441), CCDA: Cisco Certified Design Associate Study Guide comes out on top. Authors Todd Lammle and Donald Porter clearly explain what you need to know, both to pass the exam and to prove yourself a competent network technician once on the job. Some of the material that appears in these pages--a table listing various Cisco router product lines, their capabilities, and suitable applications for them, to cite one example--makes great reading, and will prove useful long after the exam is over.

The authors' presentation style uses text to great effect, explaining potentially confusing topics with clear, fact-rich prose that rewards close attention from the reader. There are plenty of helpful conceptual diagrams (illustrating network segmentation with a bridge, for example) and flow charts (a good one illustrates packet-switching logic) as well.

It's sometimes possible to forget that this is an exam preparation aid, but realistic problems and multiple-choice review questions bring readers back to the task at hand. Elaborate solutions to the problems and quick answers to the review questions appear in the back of this book (along with an excellent, extensive glossary), but the answer key would be more helpful if it included brief discussions explaining the reasoning behind the correct answers. --David Wall

Topics covered: All proscribed elements of the CCDA exam (640-441), including the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) reference model, Ethernet, network topologies, network protocols, routing, bridging, switching, and the fundamentals of Cisco hardware and software products.