Welcome to your 101 Labs book.

When I started teaching IT courses back in 2002, I was shocked to discover that
most
training manuals were almost exclusively dedicated to theoretical knowledge. Apart
from a few examples of commands to use or configuration guidelines, you were left
to
plow through without ever knowing how to apply what you learned to live equipment
or
to the real world.
Fast forward 17 years and little has changed. I still wonder how, when around 50%
of
your exam marks are based on hands-on skills and knowledge, most books give little
or
no regard to equipping you with the skills you need to both pass the exam and then
make
money in your chosen career as a network, security, or cloud engineer (or whichever
career path you choose).
101 Labs is NOT a theory book: it’s here to transform what you have learned in your
study guides into valuable skills you will be using from day one on your job as a
network engineer. Farai and I don’t teach DHCP, for example; instead, we show you
how to configure a DHCP server, which addresses you shouldn’t use, and which
parameters you can allocate to hosts. If the protocol isn’t working, we show you
what
the probable cause is. Sound useful? We certainly hope so.
We choose the most relevant parts of the exam syllabus and use free software or
free
trials (whenever possible) to walk you through configuration and troubleshooting
commands step by step. As your confidence grows, we increase the difficulty level.
If
you want to be an exceptional IT engineer, you can make your own labs up, add other
technologies, try to break them, fix them, and do it all over again.
We recommend you get some hands-on time with live Cisco equipment because it
differs from network simulation tools. See below for more information.
Paul Browning