CCIE Lab Preparation, My personal path and Recommendations
Well this post will be in two parts. The smaller first part will detail what I did to prepare for the lab.
And the in second part, I will detail what I think is the best way of preparing for the lab, based on personal experience and problems I had along the way. In short, if I had to prepare for the lab all over again, the path I’d take will be in the recommendations J
My preparation path:
Workbooks
Narbik Kocharian’s Advance Technology Workbook
IEWB Dynamips workbook vol 2 (First 10 labs)
Bootcamp:
I attended Narbik Kocharians bootcamp in April
I started my journey last year and started working on written and lab simultaneously.
I cleared the written exam in March, and then started concentrating on the lab.
Even before that my method was to read through DOC cd and make small labs to understand a technology and feature using dynamips. By the time I attended Narbik’s bootcamp in April, I had finished first 10 IEWB labs.
After the bootcamp I concentrated on Narbik’s workbook and completed it cover to cover and did some of the IEWB labs over and over again till the lab date.
I followed this path, but will I do the same if I have to do everything all over again? No, I will change the methodology and hence my recommended preparation method is as follows.
Recommendations:
Assuming you have cleared your written exam what should be your next step.
Personally I think, you should start with focusing on individual technology.
For that I recommend Narbik’s Advance Technology Workbook. His philosophy is to take a technology, make small labs about every feature and then beat it to death. When you are finished with his workbook, you have typed in 95% of commands you need to know and practiced 95% of all features that can show up.
The figure 95% is estimation, and Narbik is continuously updating his workbooks J
Now, I am also very satisfied with IE workbooks, and IE is reshaping their Vol 1 technology labs according to same philosophy. Up till now, those are in Beta Phase. So at the moment, the only deep technology workbook that I know of is Narbik’s.
I did attend Narbik’s bootcamp and I have only good things to say about it. I chose it because it was the cheapest, but the 5 day bootcamp was really informative and a great experience. Once again, I didn’t attend other vendors’ bootcamps so I cannot compare. But from what I heard, everyone praises both IE and IPexpert bootcamps as well. So I’ll also recommend Narbik’s bootcamp to all readers.
After that, you should start with full scale labs. I only tried IE first 10 labs and I was really happy with those. I didn’t try any other vendor for full scale labs so I cannot comment on those. I would recommend those to all readers as well.
In this way, by doing Narbik;s lab first, you learn to do almost everything you need to, independently. And with full scale labs, you improve your speed, stamina and learn how to approach a full scale lab and get a very good idea about how technologies interact with each other.
I hope this post is useful for readers of this blog.
And the in second part, I will detail what I think is the best way of preparing for the lab, based on personal experience and problems I had along the way. In short, if I had to prepare for the lab all over again, the path I’d take will be in the recommendations J
My preparation path:
Workbooks
Narbik Kocharian’s Advance Technology Workbook
IEWB Dynamips workbook vol 2 (First 10 labs)
Bootcamp:
I attended Narbik Kocharians bootcamp in April
I started my journey last year and started working on written and lab simultaneously.
I cleared the written exam in March, and then started concentrating on the lab.
Even before that my method was to read through DOC cd and make small labs to understand a technology and feature using dynamips. By the time I attended Narbik’s bootcamp in April, I had finished first 10 IEWB labs.
After the bootcamp I concentrated on Narbik’s workbook and completed it cover to cover and did some of the IEWB labs over and over again till the lab date.
I followed this path, but will I do the same if I have to do everything all over again? No, I will change the methodology and hence my recommended preparation method is as follows.
Recommendations:
Assuming you have cleared your written exam what should be your next step.
Personally I think, you should start with focusing on individual technology.
For that I recommend Narbik’s Advance Technology Workbook. His philosophy is to take a technology, make small labs about every feature and then beat it to death. When you are finished with his workbook, you have typed in 95% of commands you need to know and practiced 95% of all features that can show up.
The figure 95% is estimation, and Narbik is continuously updating his workbooks J
Now, I am also very satisfied with IE workbooks, and IE is reshaping their Vol 1 technology labs according to same philosophy. Up till now, those are in Beta Phase. So at the moment, the only deep technology workbook that I know of is Narbik’s.
I did attend Narbik’s bootcamp and I have only good things to say about it. I chose it because it was the cheapest, but the 5 day bootcamp was really informative and a great experience. Once again, I didn’t attend other vendors’ bootcamps so I cannot compare. But from what I heard, everyone praises both IE and IPexpert bootcamps as well. So I’ll also recommend Narbik’s bootcamp to all readers.
After that, you should start with full scale labs. I only tried IE first 10 labs and I was really happy with those. I didn’t try any other vendor for full scale labs so I cannot comment on those. I would recommend those to all readers as well.
In this way, by doing Narbik;s lab first, you learn to do almost everything you need to, independently. And with full scale labs, you improve your speed, stamina and learn how to approach a full scale lab and get a very good idea about how technologies interact with each other.
I hope this post is useful for readers of this blog.