xix
Introduction
Welcome to CCNP Routing and Switching Portable Command Guide ! This book is
the result of a redesign by Cisco of their professional-level certification exams to more
closely align with the industry’s need for networking talent as we enter the era of “the
Internet of Everything.” The previous success of the last editions of both the ROUTE
and SWITCH books prompted Cisco Press to approach me with a request to update
the book with the necessary new content to help both students and IT professionals in
the field study and prepare for the new CCNP ROUTE and SWITCH exams. This time
around, after many long talks with Hans and Patrick, Cisco Press, and other trusted IT
colleagues, the decision was made to combine both ROUTE and SWITCH into a single
volume. Hopefully, you will find value in having both exams’ content in a single (albeit
slightly thicker) volume. For someone who originally thought that a Portable Command
Guide would be fewer than 100 pages in length and limited to the Cisco Academy pro-
gram for its complete audience, I am continually amazed that my little engineering jour-
nal has caught on with such a wide range of people throughout the IT community.
For those of you who have worked with these books before, thank you for looking at
this one. I hope that it will help you as you prepare for the vendor exam, or assist you in
your daily activities as a Cisco network administrator/manager. For those of you new to
the Portable Command Guides, you are reading what is essentially a cleaned-up version
of my own personal engineering journals—a small notebook that I carry around with
me that contains little nuggets of information; commands that I use but then forget; IP
address schemes for the parts of the network I work with only on occasion; and those
little reminders for those concepts that you only work with once or twice a year, but still
need to know when those times roll around. As an educator who teaches these topics to
post-secondary students, the classes I teach sometime occur only once a year; all of you
out there can attest to the fact that it is extremely difficult to remember all those com-
mands all the time. Having a journal of commands at your fingertips, without having to
search the Cisco website (or if the network is down and you are the one responsible for
getting it back online) can be a real timesaver.
With the creation of the new CCNP exam objectives, there is always something new
to read, or a new podcast to listen to, or another slideshow from Cisco Live that you
missed or that you just want to review again. The engineering journal can be that central
repository of information that will not weigh you down as you carry it from the office
or cubicle to the server and infrastructure rooms in some remote part of the building or
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 that are there for you to
put your own personal touches (your own configurations, commands that are not in this
book but are needed in your world, and so on). That way, this book will hopefully look
less like the authors’ journals and more like your own.