One week down? CCIE Bootcamp #

Well I am sitting here recovering from what has been a intense first week of the 10-day CCIE R&S Bootcamp from the guys over at INE.

The course itself is nothing short of brilliant and I don’t think you can get a better course for your money on the market at the moment.

The first week was spent going over the core topics; switching, IGP’s, BGP, MPLS and MPLS VPN with the second week left for the smaller but for most people harder subjects such as multicast, PfR, QoS etc.

Bootcamp format #

The bootcamp itself is quite a challenge as it runs from 9am every morning until 8pm most nights and once that is over there is some lab work that you can be doing to cement some of the things that have been taught on that day.

Brian really is an awesome guy and you can tell that he really knows what he is talking about, the bootcamp itself doesn’t have a single Powerpoint presentation or video, instead it is just Brian talking and drawing on a virtual whiteboard for 9 hours a day (along with some CLI work as well).

My thoughts #

One of the things that has amazed me this week is that you may thing that you know a subject pretty well until Brian starts to go over it, he talks about every process that is ran when OSPF creates it database for instance and is able to talk you through every line in a particular show command so that you know exactly what is going on.

One of the most important thing that I think I have learned this week is that the CCIE exam is not just about memorising commands and typing them in as fast as you can on the lab day but instead is about a particular though process, thinking hard about what they are asking and then executing it in a clear and precise manner.

This weekend I’m having a weekend off from the studies as I have a friend coming down and we’re going to go see the sites of London but come Sunday night I am going to get back on the MPLS ‘homework’ and then back into some advanced MPLS stuff on Monday morning.