ICND1 study plan - need critiques

chiggah

1 month into study so far. Spending any available time i have studying. 2 hours every night and about 2 hours during the day if i find time during full time job work.

- Finished watching CBT Nuggets videos but i know it wont be enough

- Reading the Wendell Odom book so far up to Chapter 6, but it's quite boring to be honest. I found the Todd Lammle book quite interesting and more fun to read

- Been doing the practice exams which i've downloaded from exam collection - Is this site recommended ? Seems like just a ****

- Haven't set up GNS3 simulator yet. Do I need this ? I am not too familiar with the command line stuff ? How easy it is to set up ?

Anything else i should look at ? Do I need Boson ?

steve2012

You will need to become very familiar with the command line stuff. Without it, you will surely fail the exam. You need to know which commands will get the information you need to answer the questions effectively, as well as setup and configure the devices.

I too have been using Odems books, and as they may be "dry, boring," they are helping me learn a great deal of information that I need to understand this technology. Each book author has their own style. Find the one you enjoy, comprehend, and stick with it.

I like Jerremy's videos when I get tired of reading the material. I try to watch the relevant material that maps to the chapter I am reading.

Tried to setup GN3 but got discouraged with the error messages and the fact that I could not use switches with it. Did not really want to take the time to learn the software so I spent some money on the equipment and have not looked back.

Not that there is anything wrong with simulators, to each is own, just not for me is all.

This forum a great source for help, and Google is your friend. Stick with it, and you will get there.

And remember.........subnetting in your head is achievable thru repetition. Trust me, I've been there...

Steve

lantech

You will need a way to do labs to put everything in the books together. There is no way around that. If you don't want to get real equipment then try and find a simulator. I've got real equipment at home and liked it better than the simulator I have access to. Being a Cisco Academy student I have access to packet tracer which is a simulator. It's good but I still like having real equipment better. Just my preference. But to get packet tracer legally you have to be a Cisco Academy student.

If you're talking about the site I found (don't want to even try and post the name), it's definatly a brain **** and I would stay away from anything to do with them or any test sites that they list because those are considered brain **** as well.

docrice

GNS is fine and all, but nothing beats real equipment. eBay has tons of cheap Cisco 2600 series and 2950 switches. Even the old 1750 series, assuming you have the right interface cards. Get a couple of routers and switches and connect them all together. Learn to console in, break stuff, break stuff badly enough that you have to go into ROMMON to fix your startup, etc.. At the CCNA level, you should definitely get your hands dirty with cabling and other layer 1 work, in my opinion.

If you're somewhat averse to command-line work, take a deep breath and dive in. There's no going around it. While a lot of device manufacturers do have GUI or web-based management interfaces available, in many places that's considered a fallback avenue. Command-line is much more raw / direct, doesn't have the overhead of a GUI, and if your device is broken and the GUI isn't accessible, you'll need to resort to the console. Besides, GUI-based wizards and tools can be terrible at doing the work in a consistent way. At my job I've all but forbidden the use of some GUI tools since the object naming conventions Cisco uses by default doesn't meet the requirements of schemes that my organization has standardized on.

And if you're not good at typing, this is your chance to learn.

jsb515

I would also suggest googling Packet Tracer to find a place to download it and use that if you can't find or afford hardware at the moment. I actually enjoy Packet Tracer because you can build all kinds of topology with it and also find youtube videos to learn a long with it.

kurosaki00

As others have said, you really need to get into the CLI
Packet tracert is somewhat enough for ICND1
but ICND1 covers some material with the GUI, which you cant run with packet tracert
But you can with GNS3
So packet tracer and/or gns3
lammle, odom, cbt nuggets labs all together should be enough for the exam. Just practice until you can do them automatically