Books

Jared has written a very nice post over at the IPexpert Blog on a recommended book list for the CCIE R&S. Its good to see that I own 4 of the 7 books he lists on there – and I have to say the list is so much shorter than the recommended one listed by Cisco – which does have its fair share of outdated material.

It is an important part of the process to get the fundamental knowledge of all the different technologies before heading into full scale labs from the workbooks, which you can only get from reading. There is no shortcut really. While I personally didnt read any of the books I own for R&S from cover to cover, I did read large chunks of both of Routing TCP/IP Volume I and II. These books are really excellent. I would have liked to read Internet Routing Architectures a little, but found Volume II to cover most of the bases I needed. Of course the Cisco documentation contains a lot of great information too. If you are reading this and are doing your R&S then I would recommend you check out the article and buy the books.

So this brings me onto books I need for my Voice studies. It would be great if Mark or Vik could do a similar blog post for the Voice track. The thing that concerns me a little is that if the lab is due for a change in the new year, then how many of the voice topics will be out of date. Im sure that all of the Call Manager 4.1 stuff will change, along with the Unity and other non-generic topics. So for now I am going to hold off from purchasing any Voice related books until I know whats happening with the lab changes. The CCIE Voice recommended book list is here.