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Cisco Access Control Security: AAA Administration Services Review by Rik Guyler
Excellent book if you want to deploy and maintain CSACS
Brandon Carroll's Cisco Access Control Security: AAA Administration Services is worthy of consideration by anybody with either a current or future deployment of CSACS (Cisco Secure ACS). While not an all-inclusive reference, this book will get you started in the right direction. Brandon takes a large motley mixture of Cisco documentation and condenses it down to a format that is informative and easy to read.
The things I like about this book:
I found Cisco Access Control Security: AAA Administration Services a very easy read compared to the actual documentation for CSACS. Brandon does not make the same assumption as the Cisco documentation authors do in that you already know this product of the concepts of this product fairly well. Instead, he takes the approach that you know very little about the product and starts with the basics.
Starting with a technology overview, Brandon then takes you through CSACS installation, configuration and then troubleshooting. There are even several configuration examples for the client devices, such as Cisco routers and switches, firewalls, VPN devices and access points.
The style in which this book was published makes it very legible and easy to follow. I found that it contains a nice mixture of screenshots, configuration examples and diagrams, which has become a trademark of Cisco Press publications. I also did not find the numerous obvious errors that seem to be typical of most technical books.
The information was given in a clear and concise manner without a lot of fluff. With only 431 pages (including index), there was very little written that was not important to the topic. After having read dozens of technical books, this was a refreshing change of pace from the 1000+ page tomes that contain no more real content than this book does.
The things I do not like about this book:
While this book is excellent for taking you through the basics of CSACS, it is not in-depth enough to be of much interest to an advanced Engineer looking to dig into the nuts and bolts of CSACS. If your goal when considering this book is to help you get your deployment up and running with a minimum of effort than this is the book for you but don't expect it to take you deep into how RADIUS or TACACS+ works.
I also do not believe that this book should have included the chapters on the Cisco CNS AR product, which is typically deployed by service providers and so a significantly different product than CSACS. Providing only a couple of chapters to this product does not do it justice. I would have preferred a quick blurb describing the product rather than dedicating two entire chapters that serve very little practical purpose.
I recommend Cisco Access Control Security: AAA Administration Services for beginning to intermediate Engineers that wish to learn more about the concepts, deployment and maintenance of Cisco Secure ACS.