Wooo, super excited about this. I took a Cisco class in Highschool (10 years ago) and failed the CCNA (there was no CCENT back then) by about 4%, and never tried again. I started studying for the CCENT in July last year, off and on, and finally decided it was time to take the test. Passed it with a 90.7%, which was way better than I expected.
For those taking the test, I will reiterate what most everybody else has said - subnetting is #1. I was a little shaky on a number of topics, but I spent a lot of time on subnetting and got to the point where I could do most of the problems in my head in a few seconds. I'd say a good 2/3's of the questions on the test were subnetting related, and being able to zoom through those gave me ample time to think through the harder questions.
subnettingquestions.com - Free Subnetting Questions and Answers Randomly Generated Online This site is amazing to hone your subnetting - I did three or so hour+ sessions just doing problem after problem on this site, and that was pretty much all I needed. That and CBTNuggets. The subnetting strategies in Odom's book are a little too complicated for my taste. Jeremy on CBTNuggets had a much more straight-forward approach that worked great for me.
Anyway, gonna take some time to enjoy the pass, relax a little, then move onto the CCNA =D
Also just in case anybody is curious, my studying materials were:
-Odom's ICND1 book
-CBT Nuggets (can't recommend this enough. I was actually a little sad when they were over as I enjoyed watching them so much. Jeremy is an amazing teacher.)
-Some labs through Cisco (provided by WGU), although frankly these were pretty useless. Half of them were about topics not covered by Odom's book and I skipped them, finding them frustrating because I had no idea what I was doing. I have a suspicion something happened where I got assigned the wrong labs.
-Practice questions from Odom's book (I did 3 50-question tests. I thought they were much harder than the actual test, which was good.)
-GNS3 - I just made up a 2-router lab with 4 computers in 4 different subnets and messed around with OSPF, SSH, ACLs, static routing, etc. Lot more fun than following some rigid lab.
