Completed CCNP - helpful tips

mitchflossin

Hey folks,

I just finished up TSHOOT yesterday which completed my certification. Of all 3 tests, I honestly felt like the ROUTE was the hardest, although I did pretty well on it. I thought the SWITCH was easy, but nearly failed it! I aced the TSHOOT and felt like it was pretty easy if you knew what you were doing.

For ROUTE (I took it first). I spent about about 2 months studying using GNS3 (gns3vault.com) and CBT nuggets. Like I said, I thought this was a very hard exam. I finished with 2 minutes to spare and thought for sure I had failed it.

SWITCH took me about 6 weeks to prepare for. I used CBT Nuggets and Switch Simplified book by Paul Browning. I also built a lab with physical equipment. I blazed through this exam, thinking I knew most of the answers for sure, and had 30 min to spare. Had I missed 1 or 2 more questions I probably wouldn't have passed.

TSHOOT took me about 2 weeks to prepare for. All I used was GNS3 coupled with real hardware for the switches, the topology from Cisco and Kevin Wallace Bullseye videos on YOutube. I've heard numerous people state this, and I agree wholeheartedly now: If you passed the ROUTE and SWITCH, you should have no problem passing the TSHOOT. It's a much, much easier exam if you have real world experience. Oh yeah, make sure you do the demo available on Cisco's site too. I went through that a few times and found it really helpful.

Feel free to ask questions... hopefully I can help in some way. Good luck to everyone!

mitch

sadfjlfdo24

I kind of had a feeling that ROUTE would be hardest of all three and TSHOOT the easiest, just by looking at the thickness of the 642-* books
http://img837.imageshack.us/img837/1901/cisco141.jpg