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The coursebook cannot be purchased separately from taking the class; this question was answered in the FAQ at www.maxpowerfirewalls.com.

The reason for this is that normally when a course is written the topics/chapters are determined, lecture segment content is created, and then lab exercises are produced to reinforce what was covered in lectures.  I created this Gateway Performance Optimization course in the exact opposite way: I determined what performance issues could I demonstrate in lab exercises, which drove the chapter organization, and then the lecture segments for each chapter were filled in to reinforce the labs.  As such the lab exercises are the core of the class and everything else flows from them. 

I read some statistic that 90% of people learn best by actually doing something like a lab exercise, so while just reading through the course material and labs without actually doing them would be helpful, doing so is not how the course material was designed to be consumed.  Writing this course was very different from how I wrote the Max Power books which were designed to be from the beginning to be consumed standalone.