| Welcome to ISCW! In 2006, Cisco Press contacted Scott and told him, albeit very quietly, that there was going to be a major revision of the CCNP certification exams. They then asked whether he would be interested in working on a command guide in the same fashion as his previous books for Cisco Press: the Cisco Networking Academy Program CCNA Command Quick Reference and the CCNA Portable Command Guide. The original idea was to create a single-volume command summary for all four of the new CCNP exams. However, early on in his research, Scott quickly discovered that there was far too much information in the four exams to create a single volume—that would have resulted in a book that was neither portable nor quick as a reference. So, Scott jokingly suggested that Cisco Press let him author four books, one for each exam. Well, you have to be careful what you wish for, because Cisco Press readily agreed. Realizing that this was going to be too much for one part-time author to handle, Scott quickly got his colleague Hans Roth on board as a coauthor.
This book is the third in a four-volume set that attempts to summarize the commands and concepts that you need to understand to pass one of the CCNP certification exams—in this case, the Implementing Secure Converged WANs exam. It follows the format of Scott’s previous books, which are in fact a cleaned-up version of his own personal engineering journal—a small notebook that you can carry around that contains little nuggets of information such as commands that you tend to forget, the IP addressing scheme of some remote part of the network, and little reminders about how to do something you need to do only once or twice a year that is vital to the integrity and maintenance of your network.
With the creation of two brand-new CCNP exams, the amount of new information out there is growing on an almost daily basis. There is always a new white paper to read, a new Webinar to view, another slideshow from a Networkers session that was never attended. The engineering journal can be that central repository of information that won’t weigh you down as you carry it from the office or cubicle to the server and infrastructure room in some branch office.
To make this guide a more realistic one for you to use, the folks at Cisco Press have decided to continue with an appendix of blank pages—pages on which you can write your own personal notes, such as your own configurations, commands that are not in this book but are needed in your world, and so on. That way this book will look less like the authors’ journals and more like your own. |
