Books, Videos, Courses - Which Ones?
Last week, we discussed in the blog, and confirmed in a poll, that CCNA is easily the most popular first step in Cisco certifications (CCENT and CCDA being the other options). This week, I’ll take us to the next step, which is to consider the types of tools you will need as your primary study resource. I’ll sprinkle some opinions, talk about categories of tools, and some strategies. As with the first post in this series, I’ll assume that you’re new to the whole Cisco cert world, and ask you folks who are already into Cisco certs to chime in to add advice, and answer a few surveys to see if your experiences match up to some of my opinions.
Disclaimer time! I make a living writing/creating Cisco cert tools, some of which are mentioned here. I’ll be as fair as I know how in describing the options, but wanted to be up front about it.
Use One Primary Source, and at Least One Secondary Source
I’ll start with an opinion I’ve had for a long time: choose and use one primary study tool, and then use other tools to fill in the gaps. That primary tool can be a book, a video series, a course, or even the “free” option of ad hoc searching for online info. But pick one as primary, dig in, and then figure out what else works well as a secondary source.
The idea of using more than one study source may come as a surprise, but it’s been a useful strategy for a while. I remember back to when I first starting writing books, back in 1998, the same year Cisco created CCNA. The executive editor I worked with told me how most folks bought more than 1 book for Microsoft and Novell cert study, and it frankly surprised me at the time. However, in practice, I’ve seen that confirmed over and over through the years. In fact, if you search the Cisco Learning Network (CLN) for comments with subjects like “I passed CCNA today”, you’ll see lots of comments about how they did it – and more often that not the post shows that they had used multiple comprehensive tools for study.
But why? Why can’t one tool do it all? Well, it can for some people. However, the 2nd source gives you a different look at the same topics. You get a different author’s view, different style, different examples. You may get a different visual look with different figures. It helps you a lot with terminology. Different authors will at times use the same terms to mean slightly different things, or different terms to mean the same thing. Seeing a 2nd (or 3rd) perspective forces you to think about the terms, and the ideas, and meld the information together, which helps you prepare for these challenging entry-level Cisco exams.
For you folks out there established in Cisco certs, post, or at least click the polls, and let me know if that resonates with you, or not.
For you newbies, note that Cisco doesn’t just hand you a free how-to download, where you study, and if you remember everything, you’re ready for the exam. But there are tons of tools you can buy, and some for free. Let’s dive in!
(Comprehensive) Books
The idea is pretty obvious – buy and use a book that bills itself as a comprehensive tool for CCNA study.
If you search online book sites like Amazon, and search for CCNA, you’ll see lots of books. If you search CLN, and look for what the people there talk about, the most commonly mentioned books are the same books you’ll see near the top of the Amazon rankings. So, I think that I can fairly list these four as the commonly known candidates as a primary book study tool. The books are from these authors (alphabetically): Richard Deal, Todd Lammle, Steve McQuerry, and your truly.
Of these four, the ones by Deal, Lammle, and myself are in the genre of a certification guide. That means these books intend to cover all topics, and also include additional tools, like CDs with questions and other study tools beyond the text. My book differs from the other two in that I separated the topics into an ICND1 and ICND2 book, and you can buy them as a set. The books by Deal and Lammle cover CCNA in single physical volume. McQuerry’s books (also a 2-book ICND1 and ICND2 set) differ from the other three in that these books mirror the materials in the Cisco Authorized ICND1 and ICND2 courses. That is, if you go to the authorized Cisco courses for ICND1 and ICND2, the course books will be very similar, if not identical, to the slides shown during class.
Price range: $35 – $45 US, actual retail price.
Note that I call these “comprehensive” books because some books are not intended to be used as comprehensive study tools. For example, a book might list a lot of review questions for CCNA, but it might not explain all the concepts, show all the commands, explain their use, and so on. I’m not mentioning those types of tools in today’s post.
(Comprehensive) Videos
Several companies sell video series meant to cover all the topics on the CCNA exam. The format is typically a screen shot of why you might expect to see happening on the wall in an instructor led class – PowerPoint slides, drawing on the board, and output from doing demos of labs on real gear.
For specific products, I’ve seen two mentioned frequently on CLN, and another mentioned on occasion. The two commonly mentioned are the Trainsignal CCNA video series by Chris Bryant, and the CBT nuggets CCNA videos from Jeremy Ciora. I’ve personally only seen the samples on their web sites, and mention them mainly because if the frequency I see them listed at CLN.
Prices: around $400 US. The pricing is harder to gauge, because the discounts change over time (at least in my limited observations).
(Note: I have a video series as well, called CCNA Video Mentor, but it is not comprehensive of all CCNA topics – so don’t buy it to fill the need described in this blog post.)
Courses
Cisco’s training model has two major branches that matter for CCNA. First, Cisco creates authorized courses intended for folks in the IT industry. Cisco sells the course kits to Cisco Learning Partners, who are authorized and certified to teach these courses. You can find a list of such courses at the Cisco Learning Locator part of Cisco’s web site. At these courses, you receive a course book that should cover all the topics on the CCNA exam. These course books include images of the slides used by the instructor when teaching, some notes, and some review questions. The prices for this type of CCNA course in the USA runs between $2000 – $3000 for a one-week course.
Cisco also creates curriculum as part of their Cisco Networking Academy program. This material is meant to be taught in a tradition school setting, at high schools, technical schools, and colleges. It is organized to allow the instructor to teach the materials during shorter individual class periods, but with the class periods spread over months or even a year or two. These courses should also comprehensively cover all CCNA topics. The prices vary, and I’ve never done nor seen a survey.
Beyond Cisco’s courses, you can search and find other CCNA courses as well. As you can imagine, anyone can take the CCNA exams, look at other study sources, look at cisco.com, and get enough info about CCNA to be able to scope the breadth and depth of topics in CCNA. After that, it’s a matter of writing and offering a CCNA course.
Ad Hoc
You can learn everything you need for CCNA using a couple of online resources and some diligence. First, www.cisco.com has online documentation, reference docs, and other info. The Ciscl Learning Network (CLN) has many free resources. YouTube lists many videos on a variety of CCNA topics. And you can Google CCNA and finds lots of free resources. So, you could choose to attack you study with ad hoc searches, and find everything you can.
Pros and Cons as Primary: Book vs. Video vs. Course
So, which is best for you for your primary source of study? Certainly cost plays an obvious role, but there are other considerations as well. A single 1-week CCNA bootcamp may require 50-60 hours of your time, but that’s probably noticeably less than the time you’d spend reading a book and doing the same amount of lab time. Videos work great for the big concepts and specific examples, but detailed examples may require moving around the video – whereas a book may work better for those detailed examples.
To close out today’s post, I’ve listed the pros/cons for books, videos, and courses. Feel free to add your thoughts. Which will you use – or which did you use – as your primary study tool?
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