Reddit reviews CCNA Routing and Switching Portable Command Guide (ICND1 100-105, ICND2 200-105, and CCNA 200-125)

The book I see recommend around here for people looking to learn more about "Real World" Networking but aren't yet going for their CCNP or other certs, is this book.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Network-Warrior-Gary-A-Donahue/dp/1449387861

If you want, you could also grab yourself this book:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Routing-Switching-Portable-Command-100-105/dp/1587205882/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1475319461&sr=8-1&

If you know you'll be working with alot of Cisco gear. I have it, and have found it very handy when studying /out and about.

Hello there, the best advice I can give you for learning packet tracer is to just get any lab from the Internet or create your own and just type the commands in over and over again until it becomes muscle memory. That's how I learned it at least.

You might know that other teams have special coaches for each thing, which is true for the most part, but I can tell you that as someone who couldn't afford that kind of luxury it is completely possible for you to learn every single thing they want you to do through just mindless command practice.

Now you might be thinking "well that only helps if I already know the commands" which is true which is why I encourage you to either Google everything you saw over the past year, or alternatively if you can buy:

the ccna security command guide

the ccna routing and switching portable command guide

Or

the ccnp command guide which is a little less useful since it's much more advanced

Then after buying it or remembering the last year of competition, take every command and follow the second tip above.

Now as far as the cisco tutorials provided by cyberpatriot go, they are useful but won't give you any kind of edge over other teams. There are some labs though I can't recall where they were from, they were provided by cisco, but they showed tutorials on how to do things. I personally never used them but I've seen teams that get a lot from them.

Now let me be honest with you, my first year (junior year) I sucked really bad at packet tracer, I just Google everything the labs were asking and while we did make it to nationals that year I think we placed 11th or 10th in the cisco challenge. This hurt a bit so I just made the arbitrary list above so that I would learn how to do everything as efficiently as possible. Which worked very well and allowed us to get first place the next year. All it took was me just focusing on nothing but cisco and drilling myself whenever I could.

So I guess to summarize it, I'd say that the books and constant repetition where what made me good at it,but there is one more thing that I didn't mention in the guide because I didn't think people would care.

The "?" Command is the god and savior of all commands. I won't go too in depth but it basically can do 3 things:

1. If you type a command such as hostname and put a question mark without a space next to it, like this "hostname?", and then press enter it will let you know if the command you typed actually exists on that level. This works with any command.
   
   
2. If you type the command and put a space after and then type question mark, like this "hostname ?", and then press enter it will show you all available options to type after that command.
   
   
3. If you type just the question mark without any command in front of it, it will show you all commands available at that level.
   
   Since this is more difficult to explain that it is to do I recommend just going to a packet tracer or a device and just testing it out, then you'll understand the beauty of it.
   
   For your last question, yes it would help to have a member of the team be a flex pick between cisco and whatever else, not necessarily for the packet tracer, but for the quiz. While you mindlessly slave away on the packet tracer they can start on the quiz and ensure you get every answer right. I tried to do it solo junior year and as I mentioned above, it worked but not as well as I thought it would.
   
   If anything I said wasn't clear or you still have other questions don't be afraid to write another comment or PM me.
   
   Just remember that while I can give you these tips to succeed I can't force you to do anything, it is up to you to put in the work. You can't get very far in this competition without putting in the work. Good luck.

Just throwing in that I've found the CCNA portable command guide book extremely helpful for learning the CLI.

I bought the below book during my studies.

CCNA Routing and Switching Portable Command Guide (ICND1 100-105, ICND2 200-105, and CCNA 200-125) (4th Edition) https://www.amazon.com/dp/1587205882/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_kxiHAb5ZDVK8F

https://www.amazon.com/Routing-Switching-Portable-Command-100-105/dp/1587205882/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483650038&sr=8-1&keywords=ccna+command+guide
I have the third edition that I got for school. Nice to have everything in one place. Of course the alternative is just Googling and getting configuration guides from Cisco's site. Honestly everything in there is on their site, you just have to spend the time digging for it and reading all the guides.