explanation of router configs and real-world examples as well.
Practice
Exams: Practice exams are good in moderation, but don't use them as
your main focus of study. Occasionally, I'm asked for study tips by
candidates who have taken the exam a few times and not passed yet. I ask
them what they're doing to prepare, and they give a list of companies
they bought practice exams from. (You see a lot of this on Internet
forums as well.)
Don't
fall into this trap. Practice exams are fine if used as a readiness
check, but some candidates just take them over and over again, which
renders them basically useless.
On top of that, some of them cost
hundreds of dollars. That's money you'd be much better off spending on
Cisco equipment to practice on.
Again, I'm not against practice
exams as a supplement to your studies. Just don't make them the main
focus of your study. Taking practice exams over and over and hoping the
exam will be just like the practice exam is a recipe for disaster. As I
tell my students, when you're in front of a rack of routers and switches
during a job interview (or at 2AM when you've been called in to fix a
problem), the correct answer is not "D". You've got to know what to do.
And
how do you learn these skills? Funny you should ask.... Lab Time On
Real Cisco Equipment. Again, speaking from experience: This is the most
important part of getting your CCNA, succeeding on the job, and going on
to get your CCNP.
Getting hands-on experience is critical to
developing your networking skills, especially your troubleshooting
skills. Although simulators are better than they used to be, they're
still not Cisco routers, and they never will be.
You do your best learning not only when you're configuring your routers, but when you screw something up.
That's
so important, I want to repeat it - loudly: You do your best learning
when you screw something up. Why? Because then you have to fix it that's
how you develop your troubleshooting skills. You can read about all the
debug and show commands in the world, but you don't really understand
how they work until you're figuring out why your Frame Relay connection
isn't working, or your RIP configuration isn't working.
This
is true at every level of the Cisco Learning Pyramid. I can show you the
show ip protocols output or what you get when you run debug ip rip, and
you might remember it for a little while. But when you use it to
troubleshoot a lab configuration, you WILL remember it.
Putting
your own practice lab together will also help get you over what I call
"simulator question anxiety". If you spend any time on CCNA Internet
forums, you'll see discussion after discussion about these exam
questions. To a certain point, this discussion is justified. The
simulator questions carry more weight on your exam than any other
question while you can earn partial credit on them, you've got to get
them right or you will most likely fail the exam.
There's no
reason to be anxious about them if you're prepared. You don't want to be
the person who walks into the testing room that's scared to have to
create a VLAN or an access list you want to be the person who walks into
the testing room confident of their ability to perform any CCNA task.
The best way to be that confident is to know you've done it - on real
Cisco equipment.
There are several vendors that sell routers and
switches on ebay most of them sell CCNA and CCNP kits that include all
the cables and transceivers that you'll need as well. (And how is a
simulator going to help you learn about cables and transceivers?) Keep
in mind that you can always sell the equipment after you're done with
the CCNA, or you can add a little equipment to it to go after your CCNP.
Whichever
of these methods you use (and I hope you'll use all of them), make sure
to keep them in balance with each other. Don't depend too much on just
one.
On the topic of learning how to troubleshoot... as you run
labs on your Cisco equipment, you'll run into questions or problems that
you don't know the answer to yet. Get used to using Google (or your
favorite search engine) to find the answer to these problems - but try
to figure it our yourself first!
There's nothing wrong with
asking questions of someone else if you're not able to find the answer
yourself. Trying to find the answer yourself is another important
troubleshooting skill you need to start developing today. Don't be one
of these people who posts a simple question on a forum without trying to
find the answer on your own. Besides, you get more satisfaction and
build more confidence when you determine the answer yourself.
