CCIE Routing and Switching v5.0 Official Certification Guide.

This is considered to be the first volume of the new Official Certification Guide for CCIE Routing and Switching. The guide would be intended to help the candidates to clear the CCIE R&S written exam which would be considered as a prerequisite for the CCIE R&S lab exam. The book would be following the new blueprint as well as for each topic there is a reference towards the book volume as well as book chapter where you could find more information.

Each chapter in here starts with the “Do I Know This Already?” quiz, which would be followed by the foundation topics section as well as ending with the foundation summary section. Also, if you have gone through this book and still have doubts, you could solve it by joining the institute, like SPOTO.

The three important parts which would be covering topics from the blueprint are:

Part I – LAN Switching

As you might have already figured out, this part is going to cover mostly the switching topics. Basic concepts which would be related to Ethernet are covered in the first chapter. Mirroring as well as VSS (Virtual Switch System) would be also covered in this section. Next VLAN, VLAN trunking would be covered in detail. Spanning Tree Protocol is also covered to a great extent and all its flavors are going to be discussed. Additional features which would be related to STP and EtherChannel are also going to be covered here.

Part II – IP Networking

This part would be consisting of two chapters only, and the first one would be covering IP addressing. Hence, IP addressing, as well as subnetting, are going to be discussed. Also, CIDR, NAT, and private addresses would be looked over, while IPv6 is considered to be an essential topic that couldn’t be omitted.

The second chapter would be covering IP services, which would be including SNMP, all the FHRP protocols i.e. NTP, HSRP, GLBP, VRRP, WCCP, IP Service Level Agreement, Netflow, as well as Embedded Event Manager.

Part III – IP IGP Routing

The final part of this book would be considered as the largest, as it would be covering many of the pillar topics on which the CCIE R&S written as well as lab exams which would be based on. General concepts about routing, in general, would have opened the IGP topics. For each protocol, the basics, the operation as well as the configuration of the protocol are going to be covered. RIPv2, as well as RIPng features, are covered here.

Going further, OSPF and EIGRP would be explained in detail, with around 100 pages which are going to be allocated to each. Although this is quite a lot, it is a well-condensed summary of the protocols’ configuration and operation. If you really want to do a deep dive into these protocols, you could find entire books specifically about OSPF or EIGRP only. But for the CCIE R&S written exam, this summary would be considered as sufficient.

ISIS is considered to be the last IGP discussed in this part. The last chapter is oriented towards the IGP route summarization, route redistribution, default routing as well as troubleshooting. Route maps, prefix lists are going to be introduced in the discussion as they usually go hand in hand with the topics mentioned above. 

This would be considered a great book, I must say. As one would expect, it closely going to follow the exam blueprint and the fact that it is written by someone who would help you out a lot of people who have cleared the CCIE lab exam makes it very much valuable. I would recommend reading the guide, at least the first volume as I didn’t see the second volume yet, and utilize it as preparation material for your CCIE Routing and Switching written exam.

Still, if you have more doubts, you could have it solved with the experts at SPOTO, to enhance your knowledge and clear the CCIE R&S in one go.