Depending on where you are in your career is how I'm going to rate this book. If you are somewhat new to security, especially in the Cisco world, this book is the book for you and deserves 5 stars. If you have been in the Cisco security world for several years, are looking to study for your CCSP or CCIE, this book is NOT for you and deserves 1 or 2 stars.

This book does a great job on going over much of the Cisco security portfolio. It goes over the Cisco firewalls, AAA, NAC solutions, IPS, MARS, VPNs, etc. It gives some basic configurations for most of these. Again, I said basic and for a lot of these I would go as far as to say MINIMAL.

Again, if you are looking for study material for some of the CCSP exams or CCIE, this book wont get you close. Those exams dive WAY deeper into the different technologies than what this book offers.

My real issue with the book is the top line in the title "CCIE professional developement". If I see this and I see its 700+ pages, I'm thinking a Jeff Doyle TCP/IP Vol content book. Nope, not even close. If the authors wanted to cover all the different technologies that they did, but consider this book a "CCIE developement", they should of split this book into two books and expanded GREATLY on the different technologies.