Wendell is Teaching Again! Live Courses on Safari.
I’m teaching again! Yep. I taught a lot back in the 1990s – week-long classes for 35 weeks a year for a couple of years even. I love teaching, but I’ve not done as much of it as late, focusing on writing instead. Well, I’m back to teaching – this time with online courses, and they’re free! Well, incrementally free. First class is Feb 8th – scoop inside. And you can tell me what you would have put in this first course as well!
The Basics
SafariBooksOnline.com provides an online book and video library across a broad array of topics and publishers. Safari includes all my books and videos, plus many Pearson Education products, including books from the Cisco Press brand. Basically, for $40/month or $400/year, you get unlimited access to tons of IT books across several popular publishers.
Safari also now offers live online events, including live training. My friend and colleague Kevin Wallace has taught several courses already, and I’m joining in beginning Feb 8th, with several courses planned for 2018. In short, when it came time to start doing some live training, it seemed a no-brainer to team with Safari, given that so many people already go there for my book products and my Exam Prep videos.
First Course: Acing the CCNA Exam (Feb 8th, March 13th, 2018)
We’ve scheduled two dates for this first course (more dates depending on interest). The course, called “Acing the CCNA Exam: Top 10 Tactics and Other Insights”, talks about CCNA Routing and Switching exam preparation through the lens of doing your absolute best on the exam itself. That brings more attention to the later stages of your study experience, focusing on what happens after your first reading of a book or after taking a class.
The course spends about a third of the time about approaches to how to study. Part of the course discusses how to get the most out of that last month before the exam, while the ending topic of the course looks at exam day issues. However, the middle 2/3rds of the course provides the critical technology insights: a series of short courses on the most likely topics people misunderstand about CCNA technology.
Ultimately, the course hopes to help you avoid making mistakes that cost you points on exam day – simple enough.
Figure 1: Topic Flow in the “Acing the CCNA Exam” Course
IPv4 Subnetting: From Scared to Prepared to CCNA
The second live course takes a start-to-finish approach to IPv4 subnetting. You can come to the course with only basic knowledge of IPv4 addressing. (You can read get that knowledge as part of your Safari subscription by reading a few chapters of one of my books.) By the end of the course, you should have a full CCNA-level knowledge of subnetting, including the math, with practice on the math, to the point at which you should be confident with the math.
The inspiration for the course comes from the days when I taught CCNA courses in the years just after Cisco released CCNA back in 1998. When a group of students in a class told me that they planned to take the exam soon after the class, I put them through a boot camp approach to subnetting. To do that, I taught the subnetting topic over three days, each day adding more concepts along with the math. Each night, they had homework to practice the math, and each morning, I held office hours before class, when they could get help to review. (You do not learn subnetting without practicing on your own, finding your own mistakes and misconceptions, and overcoming those issues.)
This new subnetting course takes the same approach, acting as a subnetting boot camp, with two days at about four hours each. The course moves from concepts to process to practice to review, and back again. I hope you get a chance to join in if you have not yet mastered subnetting!
Figure 1: Subnetting Class Approach
What’s Safari? Why Safari?
Safari Books Online, aka Safari, aka Safaribooksonline.com, gives you access to many books and videos (over 35,000 titles per their website). Plus, it looks like they are expanding, with the addition of live courses and case studies in 2017.
What you pay is a monthly fee, $40/month or $400/year.
Since you are reading this post, you probably care about networking and also about Cisco certifications. So why would someone like you want a subscription to Safari? Here are some reasons, with some honest opinions:
A little compelling: All Cisco Press Cert Books on Safari. Read all your Cisco Press certification books on Safari, without having to buy the printed books. However, note that you do NOT get a code that gives you access to the practice tests that come with the print book. You can follow the registration steps and get the rest of the electronic elements, though.
A little compelling: Watch one live course. If you like the idea of taking one of my courses, you could sign up, take the course, and cancel, just paying for a month.
Very compelling: Watch multiple live courses. Like both my courses? Want to take Kevin’s 4-day CCNA live course? Take other courses? Check out all the current live training options here.
Very compelling: Watch multiple recorded courses. My CCNA Exam Prep LiveLessons product is several hundred dollars at ciscopress.com. Kevin’s full CCNA course is a little more. Call it $500 between them to buy the course. If you like those courses, but don’t like the purchase prices, you can rent them on Safari! Sign up for a month or two, watch both courses, and cancel.
What’s Your #1 “Doh”!
To close, I’ll ask you: What’s your #1 “Doh!”. That’s the kind of technology discussion I chose to put in the “Acing” course.
What have you realized during your studies, or during the exam even, when you realized that you just didn’t know something. Maybe you didn’t know a particular fact, or category of fact, or a relationship, or you had never thought about two concepts together at the same time. And in keeping with Homer, you wanted just to give it a “Doh!”. Let me know!