Study Material!

samuel235235235

Hey guys,

Im starting to study for my ccna now (ccna is the first cisco qualification i should be going for, right?) Could you guys recomend things i need to get through this qualification, books, materials, physical items (modems, routers, switches, etc)

Would be very appreciated! Thank you guys!

alan2308

The best place to start is with the CCNA FAQ Sticky. There's a lot of great resources in there, many of which are free.

Start with a good book. Wendell Odom's Cisco Press book and Todd Lammle's Sybex book are the two most popular. See the previews on Google Books to see who's writing style you prefer, or better yet get both because you should have more than one study source. A lot of people also like supplementing their reading with either the CBT Nuggets or Trainsignals videos. There's previews of both of those also so you can get a taste of what they're like.

You can buy gear if you like, but you can use Packet Tracer or GNS3 if your budget doesn't allow. It's still preferable to pick something up off of eBay though if you don't have any real hands on (there's a lot of $10 beaters that are at least good enough for this purpose). There's plenty of home lab threads to look at for the specifics (exact models and configurations), but the basic answer is you want at least 2 good routers and 2 good switches if you want to study on real gear (this can be had for under $200). 2 is good, 3 is better.

You should also decide early on if you want to go the one exam route or the two exam route.