When writing books, I have to stick to the topic. Blogging (supposedly) can be whatever's on your mind - quite a different beast. Today, I'm hitting a lot of small topics on a brief ramble.
First, I'll be doing a chat session for Network World on Tuesday the 8th at 2PM Eastern US time. Join in the fun, ask whatever's on your mind. Or, go to http://www.networkworld.com/chat/ and queue up your question now. The official topic is " Cisco certs and Building a Home Lab", but I'll listen to anything that makes it through the content filters. And I also got a couple of secretive questions from old friends who wanted to see if I'd notice the name - it only shows first name and last initial - so I'll be on the lookout this time!
Cisco Certified Design Engineer (CCDE) - Cisco demo'ed the practical exam user interface at Networkers. Wow. Really cool. The highlights: the interface tells you when you get new emails with notes, attachments with requirements, network diagrams, and other docs. You then see pop-ups with questions that ask you about the design choices. You have to read a lot, interpret requirements. The questions may ask you what other info you need to gather - and then they may only supply other or partial information (Now if that's not real world, I don't know what is!) They do allow for multiple correct answers in some cases, and in others, the wording is meant to force you into a single answer.
They have built-in checkpoints so that if you make a wrong design choice early, you're not directly penalized later in the exam. For example, say you recommend that the customer implement site-site VPNs in your firewalls, but instead the customer went with access VPNs with a VPN client on every host. The exam interface tells you of the choice, but it doesn't tell you whether that means you got earlier choices wrong or right. It's just like real life - you make recommendations, and then the customer chooses - and sometimes those choices aren't what you suggested.
Other cool thing is that the practical exam will be quarterly at sooped-up Vue testing centers that they use for law and medical exams. Each CCDE practical exam lives just for that day, and then they use another exam the next quarter - that'll cut down on cheating quite a bit.
Mike Morris, NWW blogger who I met at Networkers at the CCIE party, tends to write more about CCDE, so check out his blog. But just going to the CCDE session made me want to go for it. Look at Mike's blog, or go to this recent nww.com story: http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/edu/2008/063008ed1.html. (And yes, I know CCIE Party seems like an oxymoron, but it was fun...)
The other tidbit from Networkers was the introduction of a new Networking community site. Go to www.cisco.com/go/learnnetspace (that's learnnetspace, no spaces/hyphens). This site REPLACES THE CCNA PREPCENTER AND the NetPro discussion forums. More and more content to be put there - a great place to look for study resources and get questions answered.
Oh yeah, Cisco Press also announced a new Simulator for CCNA prep. The details are sketchy so far, and it's coming in October. I think it'll be a hit, but I'm biased.
End ramble.
Odom, CCIE No, 1624, splits time between writing books for Cisco Press and teaching classes for Skyline ATS. In his 25-ish years in the networking industry, he has worked as as a pre-sale and post-sale SE for a few networking vendors, as well as a network engineer implementing network technology. Wendell has spent the majority of the last 15 years teaching, consulting, and writing about networking technologies, most of which in some way relate to Cisco products. His books include titles on QoS, CCIE R/S, as well as several titles related to CCNA certification, including the September 2007 book CCNA Official Exam Certification Library (CCNA Exam 640-802) (Read a sneak peek of chapter 7). Click for the list of current titles by Wendell.
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Oh yeah, Cisco Press also
Packet Tracer 5 or another sim ?
Brand new sim
Hey Anon,
It's newly-written software. It's not a re-sale agreement beween Cisco Press and Cisco for Packet Tracer, or between Cisco Press and any of the other Sim companies to resel their products. Instead, CP decided to create the sim from scratch.
Wendell