How can I best study for my CCNA certification?
I haven’t taken it yet, but my strategy is to take classes through CCNP level, and assume I’ve learned enough that the CCNA exam will be a breeze. Also, I’ve heard that knowing the e-sims is really important…on the CCNA, perhaps more important even than hands-on experience with routers. Know the OSI model, of course. And subnetting. Lots of subnetting on the CCNA exam, or so I’ve heard. If obeying copyright laws isn’t a big deal to you, BitTorrent trackers will provide you with all the official documentation you could ever require. Remember that a lot of questions on the CCNA are specifically designed to weed out people with specialties in other networking environments. By that, I mean some of the multiple choice answers will be valid, but will be more correct for other networking platforms, and thus incorrect. So know your syntax.
I took the year-long CCNA class through my local junior college and our instructor also gave a 2-day prep course prior to most of us taking the exam. He strongly encouraged any of us who went on to actually take the CCNA exam to obtain Todd Lammle’s CCNA Study Guide (4th edition is the one I have, link shows 5th (!) edition). I started reading it and noticed that it really seems to get you up to speed for the exam pretty quickly. Good luck with your CCNA exam!
For Microsoft certification (don’t have a go!) I tend to read two different study course guide books sequentially, maybe watch the CBT Nuggets videos (but the presenters are exceptionally irritating to listen to). Doing the hands on practical stuff really helps too, I’m fairly sure with committed time I could do an MCP a week.
