Cisco learning old school

Hello! Today's post is dedicated to my unpublished training manual. The fact is that once upon a time I was a teacher of network technologies, I was very ambitious, I wanted to tell everyone, and most importantly, to teach everyone the skill of a network engineer. It was at that time that I decided to write a training manual and publish it. Now I found the time and decided to publish my training manual in the form of a site. Yes, I know that now there are a lot of sites that offer to teach how to work with Cisco, and, undoubtedly, they deserve attention and respect. But based on their experience and learning experience, the best way to learn Cisco is practice ! As I can judge by myself and by my former students, it is always too lazy to practice. Therefore, my training manual was aimed at presenting material with already prepared labs, the student needs only to open the lab and begin the practice according to the plan in the training manual.



Based on your experience, the best way to begin to understand networking is to learn how Cisco hardware works. And Cisco is working on standards like the rest of the network equipment. So having studied Cisco, it was easier for me to understand the equipment of other manufacturers. Why exactly Cisco? I will name only three main reasons (this is IMHO):

1. full of documentation, and most importantly - sane;
2. for beginners of Cisco Packet Tracer, an indispensable thing - “click, click, click” and the scheme is built, it remains only to practice;
3. the configuration process can be correlated with a conversation - “show me this,” “show me something,” “here's a new ip address” (for a conversation to take place, it is advisable to have basic knowledge of English).

Now we need to explain why the title of this post has the words " old school ". Everything is very simple. I stood on the threshold of choosing between the video ( new school ) and the text, the choice fell on the old school - you read and do .

I turn to the description of how to use my training manual (website). Further chapters will be listed, their goal is to consistently provide material:
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1. The basis of the basics . If you do not know the principles of the router and / or switch, then you have to be patient and start with the "Fundamentals of the basics". There is a lot of text, but also a lot of pictures that should entertain you on the way to learning the basics of the web. If you are confident in your knowledge and, most importantly, know how to determine the network number, having an ip address and a prefix, you can proceed to the next chapter. You can check your knowledge on a training calculator here .
2. Cisco Switch . I believe that acquaintance with network equipment should begin with a switch (switch). That's where the fun begins. In each chapter there are sections devoted to a technology. In turn, each section is divided into three subsections: "Theory", "Practice" and "Homework".
   
   
   
   
   • "Theory" - a lot of text and pictures, their goal is to prepare the reader to the subsection "Practice."
   • “Practice” is a subsection that contains a file with practical work, a description of goals, and a detailed description of the assignment for each goal. The whole practice is made according to the “snowball” principle - in each new section I tried to capture the material already studied.
   • "Home" - this subsection is made to consolidate the material covered. Proposed lab, which must be done independently.
   
   
3. Cisco Router . Now you can go to the principles of the router (Router). The chapter is built like the previous one. Despite the fact that it is entitled “Cisco Router”, it will have to deal with switches.
4. Cisco ASA . The chapter is under development.

In conclusion, I want to say that this "manual" is designed to provide theoretical and practical knowledge in the field of network technologies. If your goal is to pass the CCNA, then you should take the basic knowledge from the “official guidelines for preparing for certification exams” ( read ). And this site you can use to consolidate the material studied ( practice ).

Link to the training manual -> www.gurkin33.ru (site version 0.7.0, there is still work to do)

Very important! I am not a linguist, I was not friends with Rosenthal, and in school I had 3 in Russian, I am sad about this. The site has a special mechanism that allows you to easily point out the illiteracy of the author and help the project - select the text and press Ctrl + Enter. I must also say that I do not consider myself a first-class engineer and in some theoretical / practical points I can be wrong, there have already been such cases, they pointed out to me an error and supported this with documentation. I love criticism, especially justified.

05/26/2016 - updated the first image, took with Habrahabr groups on the social network. Thanks, Habrahabr.