Mastering Palo Alto Networks: Deploy and manage industry-leading PAN-OS 10.x solutions to secure your users and infrastructure

# Mastering Palo Alto Networks - PAN-OS 10.x Edition (2020)## SynopsisMastering Palo Alto Networks is geared towards Network Security Engineers with some experience with Palo Alto firewalls (or "Strata") seeking to improve their skillset within Palo Alto's Strata subset (Next-Generation Firewalls).## The FieldPalo Alto Networks is the industry leader for perimeter firewalling (NGFW) as of this publication and has fought hard to achieve this title. Over the last 5 or so years, Palo Alto has accelerated the rate of development with its core product line to maintain this lead, making it difficult for new users to navigate through the dizzying array of new features (1-2 major releases *per year*). The author of this book has a proven reputation when it comes to making these capabilities clear when they are otherwise buried by the product developer.This book bridges the gap between vendor documentation and actionable practice, covering visually and comprehensively every capability in PAN-OS. This is important, especially with features that are platform unique (like NAT) where the quirks are consistent, but not well understood. Many of these features are rapidly developing, and Packt worked well with the author to ensure that all examples within the text are up-to-date. Please note that at the time of this publishing, PAN-OS 10.0 was released *two months ago*, so this took considerable effort.## The BookOverall, the book is organized in a way I would consider to be in-line with what I'd expect a burgeoning Network Security Engineer should learn. I have trained quite a few people on this platform and the layout of this book generally follows the path I would consider to be "from most important, to most useful." When I say that, I mean that the fundamentals are of the utmost importance when you begin to learn because it makes more advanced topics easier to achieve mastery on. There are some side-hikes along the way. This book must be comprehensive, however, and this is unavoidable without compromising at least one of those objectives.That being said, this is a powerful utility, but should not be regarded as a standalone work. I would strongly encourage whoever has the ability to get access to a lab or test unit to try out the concepts covered in this book to truly achieve mastery. If a reader has no prior experience with the platform/subject matter, some of the concepts covered in this book (it covers EVERYTHING) may seem foreign and will be difficult to retain.My recommendation to a reader would be to take this chapter-by-chapter for best information retention. The author does an excellent job of keeping each section self-contained, so there is no harm in stopping at the end of the chapter. Focus on absorbing the knowledge fully, then move on to the next section from there. To use an old science fiction neologism, `grok it completely`.Tom Piens has provided something fundamentally important here. I'm not exactly the target audience (PCNSE 7-10) but I have struggled to provide training and resources like this to on-board new Network Security Engineers. This will be a valuable tool in my team training arsenal from here on out!## Fit and FinishOverall, this is a good first edition. It is worth mentioning that the majority of this book has been written in informal language, and will have some awkward 1st Edition-isms. This is common with other technical texts, as people in our field tend to try to get the facts down first and work on cleanup later. Given that this is effectively going to become a continual publication as time evolves, I wouldn't decry this book for that - it's going to improve over time.

I have worked with Palo Alto Firewalls for nearly 2 years and I wish I had this book when I started out.It covers everything you need to know to properly manage Palo Alto firewalls in a efficient way.The book contains information for people on every skill level and is great at explaining how the firewall works.

This is an excellent resource for PanOS 10. Anyone in cybersecurity who deals with Palo Alto firewalls (which would be most of us) will find great benefit in this book.

The writer is amazing, period. The information is laid out as so FEW in the industry do, as if he was you sitting in front of your first Palo Alto and then, having a Panoramic experience. I'll use this book in my daily work as I deal with Palo Alto firewalls 220 - 5000 series with Panorama. It's so damn well written! I used this book in concert with Exam Topics and was able to zoom through the exam AND...I very well know the material. I can actually use the machines and understand what they are doing. Excellent work. PLEASE have something written for CCNP! PLEASE! Amazing shortage of excellent writers for Cisco and it's killing us.

Great book for beginners and people with some background knowledge in Palo Alto. Concepts are well explained.