Reddit mentions of CCENT Study Guide: Exam 100-101 (ICND1)

You're correct - the ICND1 (specifically, ICND1 100-105) is the first test in the CCNA series. By passing the exam, you will be a Cisco Certified Entry-level Network Technician, or CCENT. After you get your CCENT, you can take the ICND2 (200-105) exam to obtain your Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) Routing & Switching certification.

To get started, I highly recommend picking up the CCENT/CCNA ICND1 100-105 Official Cert Guide, by Wendell Odom. It's an incredibly informative source of information. A lot of people also recommend Todd Lammle's CCENT Study Guide, which is generally regarded as being a bit easier to read than Odom's book, but doesn't quite go into the level of detail needed for the exam. Regardless of which book you decide to go for (or if you decide to go for both!), make sure you take notes while reading them, study the notes afterwards, and try to demonstrate concepts that you learn in Cisco's Packet Tracer software. Packet Tracer is available to download for free, so long as you create a Cisco Networking Academy account (which is also free.)

Let us know if you have questions!

Odom 100-101

Lammle 100-101

There are 200-101 and/or 200-120 versions of both books, but I'm sure you can dig those up pretty easily on your own.

The material I mentioned (and hated) in my first post were from Cisco's Net Acad. The classroom pace is really slow for the most part. I can't speak too much for the Lammle book, but Odom had me up and running really quickly. Lammle's is probably easier to digest.

I think I get your issue, I had a similar one. Best thing you can do is take things into your own hands. Do your own labs / exercises and experiment. I'm sure you've heard of Wireshark. If you have the hardware in class (or use VMs) do some simple packet captures. An easy one would be capturing the traffic from a telnet session from your machine to a router / switch. You'll see everything (and I do mean everything) and it'll hopefully solidify your understanding of the basic (important) concepts. Don't know the current curriculum but if you're early into the course you'll recognize Source / Destination IP and MAC addresses action along with port #s. Could do a topology like VM --> Switch --> Router to poke around and see how switches forward traffic. It's easy to do and enlightening.

And if by wiring switches and routers is an issue (I'm assuming straight vs crossover) what helped me was thinking about the layers of devices. This isn't 100% accurate, but for the basic devices (routers, workstations, hubs(lol), switches) use a straight if the devices work on different layers and use a crossover for same-layer devices. Hub is actually Layer 1, but group it with the switch for cabling.

Layer 3: Workstations / Routers

Layer 2: Switches

Switch to switch = crossover (both work on the L2 level)

Switch to hub = crossover

Router to workstation = crossover (both work in the L3 level)

Workstation to switch = straight

Router to switch = straight

And for CCNA you'll mostly care about Layers 4 and down, layers 2 and 3 are most important. 4 = ports / TCP or UDP. 3 = IP. 2 = MAC. 1 = physical (fiber, ethernet, serial)

Apologies for the small novel. The more you work with it (self labs!) the better you'll grasp the concepts.

I literally just passed my CCENT 2 weeks ago. I went home route and Used this book as a guide. I read through it maybe twice, and any sections that didn’t feel 100% on I would find other resources (mainly Cisco documentation) online to back it up. The Author is pretty good and thus far his CCNA material has been of the same standard.

My work was also kind enough to lend me a spare ISR 1921 that I took home and made mock configs with. I actually found that this really helped me, especially with the lab style questions on the exam.