Review: CCNP Route Cert Kit

Most of my CCNP studying has been through either on the job experience or self-study: working through the books, experimenting with things on my lab kit, etc etc.  That being the case I thought I would review a few of the study materials that I’ve been using.

First up is the Cisco Press CCNP Route 642-902 Cert Kit.  This is a set of three different products that retails for around £45.00 but which I managed to get for less than £30.00 from Amazon UK.  The three components are:

• CCNP ROUTE Quick Reference Guide
• Routing Video Mentor
• Online Certification Flash Cards

I’ll start with the Quick Reference Guide. Written by Denise Donohue, this slim volume (128 pages ) quickly summarises each of the main technology areas covered in the CCNP syllabus.  There’s a certain amount of mapping between the chapter titles of this book and the ROUTE Official Certification Guide which makes it easy to flip from one to the other.

The Quick Reference is very much aimed at late-stage revision.  It certainly doesn’t cover enough detail to learn the relevant technologies from scratch, but that’s not the point.  It provides a simple way of reviewing topics that you’ve already covered in depth at an earlier date.  This will definitely be forming part of my certification arsenal!

The second component is the Routing Video Mentor.  This comprises 15 videos, some six hours of footage in total, of instructor Kevin Wallace covering the topics of the CCNP BSCI exam.  Yep, you read that correctly – despite this being the CCNP ROUTE cert kit, the videos haven’t been updated for the new exam.  This means that EIGRP gets scant coverage (a single forty-minute video), while IS-IS and Multicast are still included despite their notable absence from the syllabus.

Personally I find this the most disappointing part of the kit.  Not only have the videos not been updated to reflect the new requirements, I find Wallace’s pace agonisingly slow for what is meant to be a CCNP-level tutorial.  As a case in point – the first video spends nearly twenty minutes covering routing generalities, administrative distance and static routes.  The next video spends over forty minutes covering RIPv1 and RIPv2.  I don’t know about the average bear, but that’s way too slow for my liking.  Like I said, very disappointing.

The final part of the kit is an online flash card system.  It does pretty much what it says on the tin, which is to allow you to pick different areas for questioning and receive a set of questions.  You fill in the free-text field with your answer, click ‘Show Answer’ and say whether you got it right or wrong.  At the end you get a summary of what you got right and wrong.  Well at least I presume you do as my browser took me to a blank page at that point.  Equally disappointing.

As you can probably guess I won’t be buying another one of these cert kits.  The quick reference guides are available separately and are excellent.  The online flash cards I can imagine might be helpful if I worked out how to get them working properly. The videos, in my opinion, aren’t the best way of learning.  They might work well for some, but personally I found them paced far too slowly.  The fact they hadn’t been updated to cover the new exam topics just reinforced my view of them.