Years ago, I realized that the career that I was pursuing absolutely did not have a future and after some time spent really soul searching, I made the decision to move into IT and move quick while I still had some GI Bill elegibility left. Also making this journey possible was the fact that on top of having the GI Bill money, my late wife was an employee of Washtenaw Community College, making my tuition 100% free. So beleive that I was taking double the course load that that was considered full time the entire time I was there.
Anyway, before deciding on a degree program I was taking a variety of classes and basicaly “finding my passion.” During this phase, I was taking the first of the courses written specifically for the Cisco CCNA (Cisco Netacad has everything laid out regardless of what school you’re at) and really fell in love with networking and doing so with IOS devices. So I finished the 4 classes, registered for the actual exam at Pearson VUE, and then applied the voucher that came with the program. So that’s the long way of saying that it all began with the CCNA, and yes, there is definitely a level of comfort restarting here too.
For me, studying for a cert has always been a three part process. First, I’m going to start with a good round of books and/or videos. This time I have an active subscription with O’Reilly Books, so I have online versions of every book I should need. Videos are great way to really get started and quickly, but books are still needed for the depth that I feel like I never get from a video. For this I’m going to rely on the Official Cert Guide written by Wendell Odom like always. Wendell has a reputation of being pretty dry and I’m not going to dispute that, but his books are always well written, technically correct, and everything is covered.
After powering through the book and supplementing it as needed, I’m going to move on to some serious hands on. Normally I’d look for a dedicated lab manual for a structured pass through every topic, but this time I’m going to attack it a tad differently. I have a set of 4 lab manuals that were written for a previous version of the CCNP Security blueprint and I feel like the topology used throughout can take me through all of the Cisco certs I’m looking to reaquire, as well as being easily supplmented with some Juniper devices when I move into that domain. So before committing to any certification path, I already set up the basic topology in GNS3 and some very basic config. This is where I’ll be spending most of my CCNA efforts. I didn’t find anything online referencing these lab guides with a quick search because they’re old enough at this point so I’ll probably make a post at some point to get my topology documented. I’m going to let this blog stand as my lab’s BC/DR policy.
Finally, after sufficent hands on work, I’m going to read the Todd Lammle book to review, and hit some practice questions to see where I really stand. First, Im still firm in my belief that you should always use at least 2 study sources for anything because exam topics/objectives are always vauge enough you want to cover all bases. The authors intrepreting what needs to be in the book are human, and humans aren’t right 100% of the time. And even if Wendell Odom was 100% correct on what you need to know and not need to know, hearing it from a different voice is always beneficial.
Everything I read recently online points to the Boson practice exams being more difficult than the real thing still, so if I’m correct in believing that O’Reilly has an online version of that as well this will be another first attempt pass. But Pearson VUE has a free second try special going so I should be good either way.
Happy labbing if anyone actually reads this post!