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You can't fault the authors, though--the CCIE is a daunting exam, covering a wide range of topics in a sometimes-terrifying depth. And given that books tend to fall apart under their own weight if they get over twelve hundred pages, any book publisher has to choose between packing friendliness or information into those compressed slices o' wood pulp. For the CCIE Study Guide, they chose readability, making it perhaps the only beginners' guide to the most advanced certification available.
But since you're going to be buying more than one book for this exam anyway, why not get one you'll enjoy reading? And the CIEE Study Guide functions as a stellar overview, explaining the CCIE topics with deft aplomb and some of the best writing you're likely to see in this advanced arena, where technical wizardry is often valued more highly than clarity.
The amazing thing about the CCIE Study Guide is the cleanness of the writing: it gets the essentials of large unwieldy concepts across in a few sentences. Which is not to say that you won't have to reread it a couple of times to understand some of the rough spots, but the amount of rereading is drastically minimized from what it could be. Carefully thought-out diagrams spotlight various routing issues, and definitely help with visualization.
But even considering the clear writing, the detail is fairly sparse. The responses you'll get to various command lines are sometimes truncated for space, which may cause problems for those who aren't used to sorting through pages of output to find the critical data. The sections on Ethernet frames contain information, but they're not comprehensive. In short, there's a heck of a lot here, but the CCIE will require a bit more in almost every case.
There are 20 questions at the end of every chapter, and they're all right--but they're definitely a step down from what you can expect to see on the actual CCIE, and they're all simple multiple-choice questions. No scenario-style questions to be found here, buddy. The answers, sadly, are terse and don't always explain why the other options are wrong.
In short, backed with some Web research and a couple of other books, this could be the foundation for a real passing grade--but it's not quite enough. However, if you've lost your way during all of the individual exams and need an overview--or want a refresher course that is technically accurate as far as it goes and is comparatively fun to read--then you won't regret it. This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. --William Steinmetz
