Customer Reviews

CCNA Flash Cards and Exam Practice Pack (CCENT Exam 640-822 and CCNA Exams 640-816 and 640-802) (3rd Edition)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I recently passed the CCNA. I used this book along with Todd Lammle's study guide and Certsim. The flash cards have great info and are more than just flash cards. The appendix in the end has great info and the answers have great descriptions. This book has lots of great info but covers alot of topics you won't find on the exam. The practice exam it comes with doesn't even have the same types of questions you would find on the exam. I think the worst part is the simulated questions that are way too easy. They ask you to do basic router configurations like setting the hostname. Questions like these won't be on the exam. If you are looking to pass the exam you should use Todd Lammle's study guide along with Certsim from routersim.com. The test questions are close and even word for word on a few. The simulation questions are excellent.

I'm giving this kit 2 out of 5 stars simply because these type of "child's play" questions constitute, at max, about 40% of the exam. There are two key topics this book virtually ignores that are vital to the CCNA test...Subnetting and Troubleshooting IP Routing Protocols. One must know class B and C subnets and their addressing schemes inside and out. You must be able to troubleshoot connectivity issues for a few routers that are running one of the following...RIP, IGRP, EIGRP or OSPF. Also, the chapters on Frame Relay and IP Access Lists lack depth. All in all this is a good book but the way it is marketed one could easily be misled.

The CCNA Flash Card and Exam Practice Pack is just what it's advertised as -- a late-phase add on to ensure all the nitty gritty details necessary for the CCNA are locked into your anxiety-filled mind come test day. While the flash card style is handy for quickly flipping through the information, there is a large amount of information in this book not covered in the CCNA objectives. As someone who took the 801 exam, I can't speak on the usefulness of having a separate INTRO and ICND section in the book... you'll have to determine that for yourself. Simulations on the CD were simplistic, but you can create a practice exam of just simulation questions, allowing you to become very familiar with maneuvering a router and switch, ensuring you have the basics down before you get hit with the real sims. As a late stage supplement to Lammle's Sybex book and CertSim simulations, this book is decent, but nowhere near a primary study guide or proper exam simulation tool.

If you haven't heard, Cisco has released new exams for the CCNA certification and it is only natural that Cisco Press has released a self-study flash card book that can be used for the exam study.

Completely update from the last book, which I worked on, this book now has over 1100 flash cards covering all 3 exams.

I found the questions to cover the objectives and judging from the content of the flash cards; they seem to right in line with the exams.

About the only thing the cards could use is some of them could have more detailed explanations and possible web links.

There is also a cd included, which has over 500 practice questions and another 500 flash cards. Overall a very good tool coupled with the Cisco Press CCNA Intro and ICND books.

I used this along with Wendell Odom's CCNA Cert Library (for exam 640-801) and Boson's Netsim to pass the CCNA exam on the first try. This is worth the money as a useful tool to help you drill, but is a little bit dated (lots of questions about Cisco 1950 switches which are no longer on the exam) and is annoyingly produced - not all the tear-out flash card or study pages are actually perforated.

So I found it annoying and dated, but I also found it a really useful study tool. It definitely helped and was a time saver - I still made a couple dozen of my own flash cards but was thankful that I didn't need to make hundreds. And my self-study plan with the above materials was about $2000 less than a good class.

As I wrote in my review of the CCNA Cert Library the only real weakness I felt in my knowledge after having taken the exam was with troubleshooting. It is key that you know what show and debug commands to use and where to look for information about problems with routing configuration across multiple routers. And that you can do this quickly. Still that is not what these flash cards are meant to help with; and for the details of terms, definitions and such they are really useful.

i just passed CCNA 640-801 with score 950, and i can tell this is a very good practicing and reviewing tool for CCNA exam. i give 4 stars for this book and recommend this book as a 2nd or 3rd CCNA book, use it for reviewing and practicing, not as a main study guide.

this material contains 2 main stuffs:

1) Flash Cards: which are much like a long summary of regular CCNA books. instead of making us read long chapters that are suppose to cover everything like regular CCNA books, this flash cards ask questions and explane them quite clearly, and cover most of CCNA exam objectives in the very short and fast way, that means it provides an excellent and fast way of reviewing for CCNA exam .

2)Practice Questions: the book comes with CD that contains 600+ practice questions: true/fals + multiple choices + 40 router simmulations. the questions are matched closely to the real quesions that i faced in the real CCNA 640-801 exam.

Reasons that i -1 star from this book are:

1) there is no explanation for practice questions in the CD, the authors don't tell or give any reason and explanation why this is the correct answer or why that is the wrong answer.

2) i found that the router simmulation questions are too easy, the real router simmulation questions in CCNA exam are far harder.

3)this book is weak in Troubleshoting like questions. in the 600+ practice question in CD, there is no troubleshoting questions, not even 1, but CCNA exam really require us to be able to find out what is wrong and correct it in a certain situation.

over all, this is a good practice tool that proved to be usefull for me in my preparing for CCNA exam, and i passed it, but ofcoz with another CCNA book as a main study guide as i mentioned earlier

Great buy! Well thought out and quick to use. Please.. do the readings first and use this as a review.If you have a few years of time on networks in a business this will help to you on the CCNA tests. If you use this, and only this, and have no time on networks--good luck on the test you will need it! Make this part of your review for the tests.

I had to renew my CCNA cert last month so I bought this "Practice Pack". I went through the flash cards twice and they really helped me remember a lot of stuff I forgot and did not know. The CD in the back had some simulations which really helped me on the exam. I bought Boson CCNA exams, but I felt the flash cards and the questions on the CD where way better than Boson and where closer to what I saw on the exam. I passed the exam with a 870 and felt I could of only used this practice kit as my only test prep. Overall a great product.

I purchased this pack primarily so that I could load the flash cards onto my PocketPC (Dell Axim) and study "on the run". Despite the claim that it would work with "Most Pocket PC handheld devices", it really doesn't. This claim may have been true in late 2002 when the content was developed but it certainly does not work right with the 2003 PocketPC OS. It requires the eMbedded Visual Basic Runtime which isn't supported on the latest revision of the OS. My personal experience was that once I loaded it up I had to hard-reset my Axim to get anything to work right.

Be advised.

I'm just going to make this short and sweet. I contribute passing the CCNA to this exact book and I keep it on my desk as reference. However, you're not buying this book for the flash cards. You're buying for the summary starting on page 634. Everything you need to know boiled down in condensed form. No bull and no fluff. Only con I have is that it comes with the flash cards. I'd be much happier if they sold this with just the summary so it didn't take up so much room on my book shelf.