I got an 888 (passing score was 825).
Holy crap, that was a mind twister. About halfway through the test I had resigned myself to taking it again, and started viewing it more as practice for the next one. I think that might have saved my bacon because 'knowing' that I had failed made me more relaxed.
I was surprised at how deep the questions were - they didn't want you to know X, they wanted you to know why X caused Y to happen, and what would happen if Z was configured instead.
I used:
Odom's OCG (3rd edition)
Lammle's CCNA (7th edition)
Boson exSim Max
Packet Tracer
CBT Nuggets
ICND2 notes from this forum
I also got some labbing time at work with real equipment. I probably could have gotten by with just Packet Tracer, but this was really nice just for confidence-building.
Those notes were a great resource for the last week of study. Thanks to wweboy for reposting them, and to whoever wrote them originally.
The Boson exSim was great - unlike with the ICND1, I found the actual test harder, but the practice tests put me in the right train of thought for my final studies. Up until I took them I just wasn't looking deep enough into each topic, or taking the time to really understand which show commands would show which outputs.
I'm going to take a month or two off of certifications but I'm not going to stop my networking studies. Someone (I think it was irisangel) suggested reading
Network Warrior a while back, so I'm going to pick that up this weekend and go through it. I also had a script programming class last semester that gave me a good foundation on Python and BASH. I'm not sure which of those I'm going to work on, but I've been told by engineers that it is a good idea to learn at least one scripting language well enough to use during large installations.
Does anyone have any suggestions on which scripting language would be better to learn, and what resources I should pick up to learn scripting from a network engineer's perspective?
When I get back to certs (probably mid-September) I'm going to take one of the concentrations (either Voice or Security), and then move on to the CCNP if I have a network-centric job at that point.
