Cisco Cookbook

Rating:
Summary: Very appropriate title "Cookbook". I would give it 6 stars
Review: This is not the type of book you would read cover to cover, but I found myself reading 5 chapters, and I want more. If you work everyday with Cisco; vpn, routers, and need practical shortcuts, how-tos or just an immediate solution - this is the book for you. It is a heavy book (900+ pages) - and it is true that you can find this info elsewhere. It is convenient to quickly reference this book, properly indexed, and to the point. Just read the sample table of contents - there are so many useful tricks, that anyone who has any work on a cisco will appreciate it. I rate it 6 stars. Another great O'Reilly book.

Rating:
Summary: Good depth - everything I needed
Review: Very impressed with this book. I have some experience with setting up linux based firewalls, but very little IOS experience. With the help of this book, I've just finished setting up a new Cisco router for NAT/PAT, logging, SNMP, access control and an IPSec VPN. Everything I need was covered in the book, even a non-trivial section on VPNs.

The few things I would add are:

- A "recipe" for a basic setup on a new router. Just a template that covers most of the bases (logging, access, etc) and forms a good starting point for more specific configuration later.

- A simple syntax overview when new commands are given. Something like "logging buffered <buffer size> <severity>". A couple of pages in the appendix would suffice.

Clearly these are trivial points and I'm happy to give Cisco Cookbook top marks.