CCNA Routing and Switching ICND2 200-105 Official Cert Guide, Academic Edition

by Wendell Odom

CCNA ICND2 200-105 Official Cert Guide, Academic Edition is a comprehensive textbook and study package for an intermediate-level networking course. This book has been completely revised to align to Cisco's new CCNA 200-105 ICND2 exam. Material is presented in a concise manner, focusing on increasing student's retention and recall of exam topics. The book is printed in four color, allowing students to benefit from carefully crafted figures that utilize color to convey concepts. Students will organize their study through the use of the consistent features in these chapters, including: Foundation Topics – These sections make up the majority of the page count, explaining concepts, configurations, with emphasis on the theory and concepts, and with linking the theory to the meaning of the configuration commands. Key Topics – Inside the Foundation Topics sections, every figure, table, or list that should absolutely be understood and remembered for the exam is noted with the words “Key Topic” in the margin. This tool allows the reader to quickly review the most important details in each chapter. Chapter-ending Summaries – These bulleted lists provide a quick and concise review of the key topics covered in each chapter. Chapter-ending Review Questions – Each chapter provides a set of multiple choice questions that help student’s test their knowledge of the chapter concepts, including answers and full explanations. Chapter-ending Exercises – Each chapter concludes with a series of exercises designed to help students increase their retention of the chapter content including key term reviews, key topic tables, command review exercises, and memory table exercises. Part Reviews – This new edition includes a new part review feature that helps students consolidate their knowledge of concepts presented across multiple chapters. A new mind mapping exercise helps students build strong mental maps of concepts. A new exam bank of part review questions helps students test themselves with scenario-based questions that span multiple topics. In addition to these powerful chapter learning, review, and practice features, this book also contains several other features that make it a truly effective and comprehensive study package, including: A "Getting Started" chapter at the beginning of the book offer terrific advice for how to use the book features and build an effective study plan. The DVD contains over 60 minutes of video mentoring from the author on challenging topics such as OSPF, EIGRP, EIGRP Metrics, PPP, and CHAP. The book comes complete with the CCNA ICND2 Network Simulator Lite software, providing students with the opportunity to practice their hands-on command line interface skills with Cisco routers and switches. The 10 labs included for free with this product cover a range of LAN Switching configuration and troubleshooting exercises. The Pearson IT Certification Practice Test software that comes with the book includes 4 full ICND2 exams and 4 full CCNA exams, providing tons of opportunities to assess and practice. Including the book review questions and part review questions, the exam bank includes more than 500 unique practice questions. This book also comes with a free version of the Premium Edition eBook, allowing students to access the digital copy in PDF, EPUB, or Kindle format on their computer or mobile device. A Final Preparation Chapter helps students review for final exams and prepare to take the official Cisco CCNA exams, if they want to achieve that certification. A Study Plan Template is included on the DVD to help students organize their study time. This book comes complete with full instructor supplements to assist instructors with building effective lesson plans. An instructor guide, PPT slide decks, and test bank are all offered to instructors adopting this book for their classroom. A uCertify online assessment and instruction...

Genres: Reference, Nonfiction

926 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 29, 2016

Reviews

[Hooman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Informative, but now it is better to consider 200-301, the new one, if you are new to the Cisco and networking

[Daniel Eckhoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Solid text, yet not a one stop shop. People will say it's dry but ultimately it's best not to sideline the reader with too much raff, otherwise they'll be inundated with useless information - kind of like watching a Jeremy Cioara video. This book is best accompanied with official Cisco documentation and RFCs as it is not the end all be all, but it is definitely as close as you are going to get for the ICND2.

[John Kirk · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a "solid" book, in more ways than one! I.e. it's long, with a lot of information, but that information is accurate. I read this in parallel with the CCENT/CCNA ICND1 100-105 Official Cert Guide, e.g. I read the IPv4 chapters from both books, then the IPv6 chapters from both books. Each book has over 900 pages, and it took me months to slog through them. Some chapters from the 100-105 book are repeated verbatim in the 200-105 book; in other circumstances, I'd complain about padding and paying for the same thing twice, but in this case it was a relief to be able to skip forward a chapter!

I personally found this more interesting than the 100-105 book, because more of the content was new to me. However, that's subjective, so it will depend on your own past experience. As with the other book, the author is limited by the exam syllabus. For instance, chapter 6 describes the concepts of DHCP snooping (exam objective 1.7.b) but doesn't cover the implementation. When this book was published in 2017, the 210-260 CCNA Security exam would cover configuration (objective 4.5.a), but as of 2020 that's been incorporated into the 200-301 version of CCNA (objective 5.7). Similarly, this book doesn't even mention RA guard, i.e. the IPv6 equivalent. However, there are other places to learn about that. So, just be aware that this book (and the certification itself) won't necessarily teach you everything you need to know to actually do your job as a network administrator.

Likewise, the book has to match how Cisco devices actually work, rather than the wider world. For instance, chapter 10 (p255) refers to "a default delay setting of 100 microseconds (usec)". The SI prefix for micro is μ (the Greek letter Mu), so in a Physics paper that should say "μsec". However, I assume that Cisco devices don't support Unicode, and it makes sense for the book to be consistent with that.

I submitted some errata for this book in Feb 2020, but the Cisco press webpage was last updated in Nov 2019. It's disappointing that they ignored my submissions, and there are a few bits that are flat out wrong, i.e. they change the meaning of the text. In particular:

* Chapter 6, p150, figure 6-6. "aaa authentication line default" should be "aaa authentication login default"

* Chapter 20, p564, table 20-7, second row. The HSRP priority is listed as "0..255" but that's only true for v1. It could be 0..4095 for v2.

* Chapter 24, p654, example 24-6 (caption). Change "OSPFv3" to "EIGRP for IPv6".

* Chapter 26, p709, 2nd paragraph. If example 26-9 matches 26-7, it shouldn't have an ACL for BookGroup1. (Alternately, example 26-7 should specify that ACL.)

(Those errata all refer to the 5th printing of the book.)

Ultimately, if I decide to take the 200-301 exam then I'll buy Wendell Odom's books for that. Based on this one, I'm confident that he'll fill in any gaps in my knowledge, even if it's a slog to get through them.

[Josh Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

“CCNA Routing and Switching ICND2 200-105” moves both forward and backward in time from the events in “CCNA Routing and Switching ICND1 100-105,” in an attempt to resolve our feelings about the Corleones. In doing so, it provides for itself a structural weakness from which the book never recovers, but it does something even more disappointing: It reveals a certain simplicity in Wendell Odom’s notions of motivation and characterization that wasn’t there in the elegant masterpiece of his earlier book.

Odom handles a lot of this material very well. As in the earlier book, he reveals himself as a master of mood, atmosphere, and period. And his exposition is inventive and subtle. The book requires the intelligent participation of the reader; as Michael attempts to discover who betrayed him and attempted his assassination, he tells different stories to different people, keeping his own counsel, and we have to think as he does so we can tell the truth from the lies.

Thanks, Wendell Odom, for helping me pass my CCNA this year!

[Aaron Case · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boring but informative

[Matthew Rollins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Study Guide and Reference

I think this book is essential for studying for the CCNA. Well until Feb 23rd, then I would imagine there will be another set.

[Hugo Darino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, I have learned a new found respect for my peers in Network Operations and Network Engineering. There is so much work, thought, and outright hard work to properly design, implement, and support a good network. When done right, users are 100% unaware of all the work required to achieve it, and naturally will not ever have a reason to think or need to engage the network groups responsible for making it happen.

As an infrastructure professional who spent most of his career understanding the role of properly configured and managed servers, services, and clients, I also recognize that it takes the same kind of philosophy and meticulous attention to detail for end users to have no reason to complain.

I take my hat off for all you network professionals, I salute you on mastering all these skills taught in this course, I can only imagine all the additional work and study for you CCNPs, CCIEs, etc.

[River · Rating 4 out of 5]

A common criticism of Odom's texts is that they're too dry, but I don't feel this way at all. For one, I have found that the textbooks that try to make things a bit more fun tend to have more errors in them! See my review of another CCNA textbook, by Todd Lammle, to get more insight on what I'm talking about.

For another, I would much prefer to get the straight facts, unsullied by vain attempts at humor. I'm reading these books for educational and career purposes, not to try and get a laugh!

Anyhow, the two of Odom's textbooks I have read - for the ICND1 and ICND2 - were the highest quality, with only two spelling errors that I can recall. The CD supplement really helps to dig into why one answer to a question is correct and why the other answers are incorrect is a GIGANTIC help. The only reason I don't give this book a full five stars is that the book claims that it comes with free practice tests, but my brand new copy of the textbook offers no clear way of actually obtaining said tests. Of course, I believe this is most likely an error on my part, though I do feel it should be more clear how to redeem said tests.

Note: Finished reading this on May 4, 2019 but I do not wish for this to show in any of my reading challenges, so it has no date.