R3d

alright.. well im going to start back to school in Sept. and im going to get my MCSE.. just wondering if theres any sites or anything that i can start reading to give me a head start.. or some stuff to get me started for what i need to know for the course..

just wonderin if there were any links that i could take a look at.. spend some time reading.. just recently had surgery on my knee.. so im not gonna be movin much at all for the next few weeks.. just need something to do with my free time..

thanks in advance to all who reply..

Jason

Finchie

Pragma

I've always been a fan of Sybex books - you could look into ordering some of those and reading through them. I found their books very useful for when I got my CCNA.

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Redjake

how much did your CCNA cost? I hear it's in the thousands to do it nowadays........unless you can get your employer to pay it for you (via an agreement or something)

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R3d

whats the difference between the MCSE certification and the CCNA one?.. im in western canada.. and i havent really heard much at all about the CCNA

thx for the link.. got loads of info on there

Peryn

I am no expert, as i have not done it personally. My dad just got his CCNA cert a few days ago, so this is how i understand it. I dont know about costs once you pass the cert test, but the test itself was $150 for him. 2 semesters (4 cisco courses) school @ $18/unit @ 6 or 8 units/semester.... as i understand it, education AND testing came out to about (with a TON of room for errors) <$600 and a year of classes outside of work.

Probably could get much more expensive, or a lot cheaper depending on how/where you go about learning it though.

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Dont cry kid, It's not your fault you suck.

Cynthetiq

good luck!!!!

I didn't bother to get any certs... but I've worked in many capacities for large fortune 500s, just not financial companies.

Remember to back up your paper with some practical experience.

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Crack

Which would be better though, only experience, or Only Certs...
(I only have the Experience, so I hope somebody chooses that option...)

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Kaos

It would be nice to get hired and get some experience to go with all my certifications

Pragma

The test cost me 150 USD - and I passed it on my second try (so total 300$ in test costs), and I bought 4 books (3 Cisco Press, 1 Sybex), and the total book cost was about 225$.

Granted, I passed the 640-607 test back in October and since then Cisco has done an overhaul for the CCNA track. However, I believe that the new test is still only 150$ (if you take the combined one, they now have CCNA Basics and Interconnecting Cisco Network Devices as different tests as well).

The training is way more money than I was prepared to spend, though I hear lots of good things about it.

However, CCNP (which is what I'm working on now), I'll probably end up having to take out loans to get training, as I don't anticipate being able to book-learn my way to passing the exams.

Pragma

CCNA = Cisco Certified Network Associate - it's your basic network engineer certificate, says you know how to configure routers, switches, some work with more advanced stuff like frame relay, virtual circuits, so on and so forth.

MCSE = Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer - it says you're capable of being a system administrator on whatever OS you get certified for.

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Eat antimatter, Posleen-boy!

jvwgtr

Getting your MCSE is a great choice!
It forces you to study the complete range of networking, and even if you never use some of the stuff you learn, it comes in handy when you're tracking down weird problems in real life.
I'm not a exclusively a sys admin, but having a Microsoft certification pretty much got me my programming job.

One thing I noticed in the tests is that Microsoft really focuses on exceptions to rules, not just rules themselves. Pay attention to any "gotchas."

Believe it or not, I got mine using the "...For Dummies" book series.
If you do a search for "braindump" you can find some good forums where people who have just taken the tests post everything they remember about it.
In some cases, the tests were practically word-for-word.
It gives you more of an idea of what you need to look up, at any rate.

Good luck!

Cynthetiq

for me it was not getting any certs because then it was taking time away from billable hours that I could be charging.

but that was back in the heyday of the whole computer thing from 89-2002.

mind you also, I don't have a college diploma either, again for the same reasons, in 1989 Disney and several other companies threw buckets of money at me to work for them so I dropped out.

nothing is a holy grail, it boils down to your hard work and perserverence.

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R3d

just wanna thank you guys for the posts so far...

anyone have any funny stories that you've come across either getting your degree's or helping ppl with their comp problems?