Do NOT buy this - you will end up spending time returning it, or worse, having it sit on your shelf because you don't have time to return it and you just wasted a ton of money on this book!

It is filled with mistakes and contridictions

Very hard to read...boring is an understatement!!

Stick with Sybex...you won't be disappointed...I love the new Todd Lammle book. I learn and laugh, something that you can't find too much these days!!

Tech books often have mistakes. This one is unbelievable. This book feels more like learning via the gauntlet. You learn by double checking everything in this book against other sources.

It's too bad, I like the outline of the book, how it layers information in progressive steps. It's just too often bad info. And the Cisco errata sheet is a one page joke. Do not use this book as your only source.

Please note the one positive review here is reviewing the ICND book, not Intro.

This is a really good book. As the led Cisco Instructor for the University of Maryland, it was refreshing to see Cisco's new ICND book answer many of my students questions. The book goes into OSPF and EIGRP, something that its predecessor barely touched on. The book also does a much better job of explaining VLANs and Dial on Demand Routing. This gives CCNA's a leg up on preparing to work in the networking field. They now have the information they need to work on the vast majority of computer networks out there. In the past students would ask why these subjects were not covered adequately at the CCNA, when these skills were what employers were asking of them. Cisco has come through and produced a quality product.

I like this book so much that I asking my department head to start using the book immediately!

Spelling errors throughout, chapter review answers often wrong. I can't believe a CCIE would put his name to this. Extremely disappointing. It looks like this book was rushed to print. Cisco Press should be ashamed of themselves.

I expected a lot more out of Cisco's publishing arm. This book was my only information source for the 640-821 exam. I just took the exam today and passed it comfortably, so that's why this book got 2 stars instead of 1 :).

It was exciting to read the book at first anticipating the understanding of devices and concepts I've been working with but never took the time to learn about. However, you come to realize that this book doesn't go too deep into the subjects. Instead it chooses to seemingly only give you enough information to pass an exam. This would've been acceptable to me, especially considering this is the INTRO exam. But the material contradicts itself sometimes, is plainly wrong sometimes and doesn't always give you the feeling that you really understood what it presented.

It was extra frustrating to take the quizes throughout the chapters. This was my only opportunity to see what the exam might be like. And, again, clear mistakes in the answers to really throw you off.

Maybe I did well on the exam because this book made me think about everything twice? I almost yelled at the computer I took the exam on when it asked me how many concurrent telnet sessions a cisco router allows. The book never mentions this.

I have to imagine there are better books out there on this, at least buy another book in additon to this one.