CCNA Passed. Materials Used, Methodology, etc.

Uriah7

Hey everyone,

Just passed 200-105 with an 836. I'll keep this short; kind of.

Materials:
Lammle's 200-105 study guide.
ITProTV Accelerated 200-105 with Lammle.
Boson 200-105 Pratice Tests.

Equipment:
4 routers, 2 Layer 3 switches, 1 layer 2 switch.

Methodology:
Read through Lammle's study guide and created flash cards along the way. Ended up with about 500 flash cards.
Read through flash cards, cycling out cards that I felt I understood until I had no cards left.
Ran through all of the ITProTV practice labs, which are incredible. I can't stress to you enough how amazing these labs are. I used their emulated CLIs as well as my own equipment. Lammle's book comes with a free month of ITProTV.
Took the Wiley pratice exams that come with Lammle's book.
At this point, I did not feel prepared enough to take the exam even though practice tests went great.
Ordered the Boson practice exams 2 days before my exam date. Did terrible on my first exam (around 74%). Panicked. Panicked more. Studied Boson's explanations for each question's answer.
Took the last 2 Boson exams and scored a 81% on my final exam.

Conclusions:
I feel that Lammle doesn't go deep enough into the topics, but he does give a good base. I would have failed with only his material. The boson practice tests saved me as well as the ITProTV labs. The boson exams are necessary to pass if you go with Lammle's curriculum. For example, Lammle doesn't go over how to configure, troubleshoot and verify SNMPv3 which is an exam objective. The same goes for HSRPv2. He brushes over the APIC-EM Path Trace tool and I feel that Boson covers it much better. His depth on STP is far from acceptable but Boson takes care of it.

Final thoughts: I have a CS degree and the hardest tests I took during algorithm analysis, physics, etc. do not compare to the difficulty of this exam. This is my opinion. Others may think that I am exaggerating, but for me, this was very difficult. I don't say this to discourage anyone, only to prepare them for the weight of the exam. I am here to answer any questions. Also, I have posted numerous questions on this forum and you have all been very helpful. I am thankful for this community and I hope to give back as much as possible.

Kindly

greg9891

Congrats!