Posted on Thursday, 17th August 2006 by sean
I just got back from passing 642-811. Even though I ended up with a 962 the number of questions that I thought “I think that’s the right answer” would have made me think my score would have been lower (though as I go back and check, it looks like I was right on most)
Compared with the previous incarnation, this one is far more in depth — more analysis of spanning trees, in depth question on multicast, HSRP, GLBP. Several questions where you were given some show commands or debugs and asked to interpret what’s going on. The simulations were very straightforward.
I mostly used the new CCNP Self-Study: Building Cisco Multilayer Switched Networks (BCMSN), 3rd Edition (ISBN 1-58705-219-9)and some reading on cisco.com (and on the job experience, of course). I also flipped through the corresponding exam prep guide by Cisco Press, though it turned out to be the second edition which older.
Cisco Press generally puts out two books for each exam, one is the exam certification guide that is focused on the exam. The other is the foundation guide, which is basically the course notes that have been expanded into a book, and is what I used.
In this case, the exam prep guide was older and had some topics that were no longer valid, and were missing some content. The foundation book was far more in depth on all the right topics.
I found the foundation guide to be well written, though when I was reading docs on STP on CCO I found them to be nearly identical to the book. In most cases the book had done a good job of distilling the online content, though I remember one case where the online version had a worked out example for 802.1s/w that clarified a doubt I had.
All in all I’m happy with my results. The book I used did a good job of guiding me through the topics that I don’t have experience in, and even pointed out a couple of things in the areas that I work with daily. If I had to go back I’d have studied more on MST and multicast, which seemed to be the areas that I had the most problems.
I saved a lot of links that might prove helpful.
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Posted in Reviews, Switching | Comments (1)
September 8th, 2006 at 6:34 pm
congratulations dude!