CCNA ICND2 Official Exam Certification Guide: CCNA Exams 640-816 and 640-802 - Hardcover

Odom, Wendell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 158720181X ISBN 13: 9781587201813

Publisher: Cisco Systems, 2007

Synopsis

CCNA ICND2 Official Exam Certification Guide

Second Edition

 

• Master ICND2 640-816 and CCNA 640-802 exam topics with the official study guide
• Assess your knowledge with chapter-opening quizzes
• Review key concepts with Exam Preparation Tasks
• Practice with hundreds of exam questions on the CD-ROM

 

Wendell Odom, CCIE® No. 1624

 

CCNA ICND2 Official Exam Certification Guide, Second Edition, is a best of breed Cisco® exam study guide that focuses specifically on the objectives for the CCNA® ICND2 exam. This fully updated edition presents complete reviews and a more challenging and realistic exam preparation experience.

 

Senior instructor and best-selling author Wendell Odom shares preparation hints and test-taking tips, helping you identify areas of weakness and improve both your conceptual knowledge and hands-on skills. The material is presented in a concise manner, focused on increasing your understanding of exam topics and preparing you for the numerous challenges the exams present.

 

CCNA ICND2 Official Exam Certification Guide, Second Edition, presents you with an organized test preparation routine through the use of proven series elements and techniques. “Do I Know This Already?” quizzes open each chapter and allow you to decide how much time you need to spend on each section. Chapter-ending Exam Preparation Tasks sections help you drill on key concepts you must know thoroughly and help increase your speed in answering questions, a difficult hurdle many exam candidates face on the new exams. A Final Preparation chapter guides you through tools and resources to help you craft your final study plan. Special troubleshooting sections help you master the complex scenarios you will face on the exam.

 

The companion CD-ROM contains a powerful testing engine that allows you to focus on individual topic areas or take complete, timed exams. The assessment engine also tracks your performance and provides feedback on a chapter-by-chapter basis, presenting question-by-question remediation to the text. The bonus DVD contains more than 60 minutes of personal video mentoring from the author focused mainly on bringing difficult subnetting concepts to life.

 

Well-regarded for its level of detail, assessment features, and challenging practice questions, this book provides you with more detailed information and more realistic practice exercises than any other CCNA study guide, enabling you to succeed on the exam the first time.

 

CCNA ICND2 Official Exam Certification Guide, Second Edition, is part of a recommended learning path from Cisco that includes simulation and hands-on training from authorized Cisco Learning Partners and self-study products from Cisco Press. To find out more about instructor-led training, e-learning, and hands-on instruction offered by authorized Cisco Learning Partners worldwide, please visit www.cisco.com/go/authorizedtraining.

 

Wendell Odom, CCIE® No. 1624, has been in the networking industry since 1981. He currently teaches QoS, MPLS, and CCNA courses for Skyline Advanced Technology Services (www.skyline-ats.com). Wendell has worked as a network engineer, consultant, systems engineer, and instructor and course developer, and has taught authorized Cisco courses for the majority of the last 14 years.

 

The official study guide helps you master all the topics on the CCNA ICND2 exam, including

• Virtual LANs and Spanning Tree Protocol
• Static and connected routes
• VLSM and route summarization
• IP access control lists
• OSPF and EIGRP configuration
• Point-to-point WANs
• Frame Relay
• VPNs
• Network address translation
• IPv6
• Troubleshooting

 

Companion CD-ROM

The CD-ROM contains an electronic copy of the book and 200 practice questions for the ICND2 and full CCNA exams, including simulation and testlet questions, all available in study mode and test mode.

 

BONUS DVD

The DVD contains more than 60 minutes of personal instruction from the author!

 

This volume is part of the Exam Certification Guide Series from Cisco Press®. Books in this series provide officially developed exam preparation materials that offer assessment, review, and practice to help Cisco Career Certification candidates identify weaknesses, concentrate their study efforts, and enhance their confidence as exam day nears.

 

Category: Cisco Press—Cisco Certification

Covers: CCNA ICND2 Exam 640-816

 

 

About this title

About the Author:

Wendell Odom, CCIE No. 1624, has been in the networking industry since 1981. He currently teaches QoS, MPLS, and CCNA courses for Skyline Advanced Technology Services (http://www.skyline-ats.com). Wendell also has worked as a network engineer, consultant, and systems engineer, and as an instructor and course developer. He is the author of all prior editions of CCNA Exam Certification Guide, as well as the Cisco QoS Exam Certification Guide, Second Edition, Computer Networking First-Step, CCIE Routing and Switching Official Exam Certification Guide, Second Edition, and CCNA Video Mentor, all from Cisco Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

CCNA ICND2 Official Exam Certification Guide, Second Edition

CCNA ICND2 Official Exam Certification Guide, Second Edition

Introduction

Congratulations! If you're reading far enough to look at the introduction to this book, you've probably already decided to go for your Cisco certification. If you want to succeed as a technical person in the networking industry, you need to know Cisco. Cisco has a ridiculously high market share in the router and switch marketplace, with more than 80 percent market share in some markets. In many geographies and markets around the world, networking equals Cisco. If you want to be taken seriously as a network engineer, Cisco certification makes perfect sense.

Historically speaking, the first entry-level Cisco certification has been the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) certification, first offered in 1998. The first three versions of the CCNA certification (1998, 2000, and 2002) required that you pass a single exam to become certified. However, over time, the exam kept growing, both in the amount of material covered and in the difficulty level of the questions. So, for the fourth major revision of the exams, announced in 2003, Cisco continued with a single certification (CCNA), but offered two options for the exams to get certified: a single-exam option and a two-exam option. The two-exam option allowed people to study roughly half of the material, and take and pass one exam, before moving on to the next.

Cisco announced changes to the CCNA certification and exams in June 2007. This announcement includes many changes, most notably:

• The exams collectively cover a broader range of topics.

• The exams increase the focus on proving the test taker's skills (as compared with just testing knowledge).

• Cisco created a new entry-level certification: the Cisco Certified Entry Network Technician (CCENT) certification.

For the current certifications, announced in June 2007, Cisco created the ICND1 (640-822) and ICND2 (640-816) exams, along with the CCNA (640-802) exam. To become CCNA certified, you can pass both the ICND1 and ICND2 exams, or just pass the CCNA exam. The CCNA exam simply covers all the topics on the ICND1 and ICND2 exams, giving you two options for gaining your CCNA certification. The two-exam path gives those people with less experience a chance to study for a smaller set of topics at a time, whereas the one-exam option provides a more cost-effective certification path for those who want to prepare for all the topics at once.

Although the two-exam option will be useful for some certification candidates, Cisco designed the ICND1 exam with a much more important goal in mind. The CCNA certification has grown to the point that it tested knowledge and skills beyond what an entry-level network technician would need to have. Cisco needed a certification that was more reflective of the skills required for entry-level networking jobs. So, Cisco designed its Interconnecting Cisco Networking Devices 1 (ICND1) course, and the corresponding ICND1 640-822 exam, to include the knowledge and skills most needed by an entry-level technician in a small enterprise network. And to show that you have the skills required for those entry-level jobs, Cisco created a new certification, CCENT, which is attained by passing the ICND1 exam.

Figure I-1 shows the basic organization of the certifications and the exams used for getting your CCENT and CCNA certifications. (Note that no separate certification exists for passing the ICND2 exam.)

Figure I-1
Cisco Entry-Level Certifications and Exams

As you can see from the figure, while the CCENT certification is available by taking the ICND1 exam, you do not have to first be CCENT certified before getting your CCNA certification—you can choose to just take the CCNA exam and bypass the CCENT certification.

The ICND1 and ICND2 exams cover different sets of topics, with a minor amount of overlap. For example, ICND1 covers IP addressing and subnetting, while ICND2 covers a more complicated use of subnetting called variable-length subnet masking (VLSM), so ICND2 must then cover subnetting to some degree. The CCNA exam covers all the topics covered on both the ICND1 and ICND2 exams.

While the popularity of the CCENT certification cannot be seen until a few years have passed, certainly the Cisco CCNA certification enjoys a position as the most popular entry-level networking certification program. A CCNA certification proves that you have a firm foundation in the most important components of the Cisco product line—namely, routers and switches. It also proves that you have a broad knowledge of protocols and networking technologies.

Format of the CCNA Exams

The ICND1, ICND2, and CCNA exams all follow the same general format. When you get to the testing center and check in, the proctor will give you some general instructions and then take you into a quiet room with a PC. When you're at the PC, you have a few things to do before the timer starts on your exam. For example, you can take a sample quiz, just to get accustomed to the PC and to the testing engine. Anyone who has user-level skills in getting around a PC should have no problems with the testing environment. Additionally, Chapter 18, "Final Preparation," points to a Cisco website at which you can see a demo of the Cisco test engine.

When you start the exam, you are asked a series of questions. You answer a question and then move on to the next question. The exam engine does not let you go back and change your answer. Yes, that's true—when you move on to the next question, that's it for the earlier question.

The exam questions can be in one of the following formats:

• Multiple-choice (MC)

• Testlet

• Drag-and-drop (DND)

• Simulated lab (Sim)

• Simlet

The first three types of questions are relatively common in many testing environments. The multiple-choice format simply requires that you point and click a circle beside the correct answer(s). Cisco traditionally tells you how many answers you need to choose, and the testing software prevents you from choosing too many answers. Testlets are questions with one general scenario, with multiple MC questions about the overall scenario. Drag-and-drop questions require you to click and hold the mouse button, move a button or icon to another area, and release the mouse button to place the object somewhere else—typically into a list. So, for some questions, to get the question correct, you might need to put a list of five things into the proper order.

The last two types both use a network simulator to ask questions. Interestingly, the two types allow Cisco to assess two very different skills. First, Sim questions generally describe a problem, and your task is to configure one or more routers and switches to fix the problem. The exam then grades the question based on the configuration you changed or added. Interestingly, Sim questions are the only questions that Cisco (to date) has openly confirmed that partial credit is given.

The Simlet questions might well be the most difficult style of question on the exams. Simlet questions also use a network simulator, but instead of answering the question by changing the configuration, the question includes one or more MC questions. The questions require that you use the simulator to examine the current behavior of a network, interpreting the output of any show commands that you can remember to answer the question. While Sim questions require you to troubleshoot problems related to a configuration, Simlets require you to both analyze working networks and networks with problems, correlating show command output with your knowledge of networking theory and configuration commands.

What's on the CCNA Exam(s)?

Ever since I was in grade school, whenever the teacher announced that we were having a test soon, someone would always ask, "What's on the test?" Even in college, people would try to get more information about what would be on the exams. At heart, the goal is to know...

About this edition

• Publisher: Cisco Systems
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 158720181X
• ISBN 13: 9781587201813
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 690