MeToo’s Blog

Last week I attended IPExpert’s Routing and Switching boot camp with instructor Joe Astorino. I highly recommend it to anyone pursuing their CCIE. I started out a little leary since Joe is still fairly new to the instructor stage but leading up to the class I read some of the post’s he has written and some of the responses he gives on Online Study List and started to get more excited. He has a knack for explaining things so that they make sense.

I don’t have a frame of reference in the CCIE world to compare or contrast him to other instructors, but I have taken other IT training classes and he stacked up favorably to any of them. Despite being sick he was engaging. I have heard people rave about Narbik in that he doesn’t use any power point slides. Well this course did use them, we covered 800 slides in 4 days, but Joe never hesitated to go to the whiteboard or the command line to demonstrate a point. I personally didn’t mind the slides but was glad he was willing to depart from them as well.  Joe does not know everything, and occasionally is incorrect. This to me was actually encouraging. I remember thinking, “OK I don’t have to know every command line switch to become a CCIE”. What Joe did do when there was doubt is the true key to obtaining CCIE in my opinion. He showed us exactly how to find things on the DOCCD and how to test them on the command line.

I think you can only get out what you put in from any class you take. There was a gentleman there that only seem peripherally engaged, I sat behind him and noticed on a couple occasions he was reading a PDF of a novel. I just don’t understand this, I guess it probably wasn’t his money that paid for the class. If you are engaged though I think the class offers you plenty to take away. I know I felt like I got my money’s worth. Every day we went from about 9:00am-7:00 or 7:30 and then I would have 3-4 hours of homework each night. By Thursday evening I was a little fried and decided to save that bit of homework for when I got home.

The class is not to teach you the blueprint, 5 days is not nearly enough time for that. You will get the most out of the class if you have already covered the topics and are just getting clarification on the intricacies. I went in feeling about 70% prepared. I had completed 2/3rd of the volume 1 labs from IPX.  I think I was average in relation to the rest of the class. I had an ok understanding of some of the core topics but some of them were still pretty foreign to me. One of the best things I got out of class was a 10x better understanding of MPLS.

The class covers 2 brand new labs, 1 which you work on through the week, building on each day. The second is a mock exam on Friday. Joe had warned us to not get discouraged by the Friday lab, that it was much harder than the actual CCIE test. I found it to be quite hard indeed and was only about to complete a few sections. Both labs are fantastic however and really teach you, and warn you against gotcha’s. Both labs also include troubleshooting sections which is an area I need much practice with.

In the end I left the class very invigorated to continue this quest. It is beginning to feel attainable. I am starting to feel like I have seen the information on the blueprint and know roughly how it goes together. I am still quite a distance away and I really need to much more practice, but I can see marked progress.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 10:07 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.