I'm thinking about studying for my CCNA certification...I'm doing a heap of training this year through work, but none of it is very technical so I want to do this myself. Can anyone recommend me some decent books so I can study this self-paced. There's a tonne of books out there, but I don't know what's good and what's not.

testking - all you need to know

Ta, I'll take a look.

testking x 2

Oh what a timely thread - I just found out we're possibly getting cisco 3600's for all our offices and its something i'd be pretty keen to learn myself.

The 3600's take me back a bit, I've got 2 3640's sitting next to my computer at home. What sort of 3600's were you getting? They're good routers for learning ccna stuff on.

from the looks of things we're looking around at 3660's and some of the guys are getting/have 2621's @ home. It's all a bit over my head atm - but thats the fun part :D

Depends what path you want to go down. The 2 exam path is more of a cram session. The single exam path benefits people with experience because the exam tends to focus on real world scenarios and trouble shooting rather than the text. I found CCNA Intro and CCNA ICND by Wendell Odom quite good. I also used the CNAP 1-2 and 3-4 books.

In terms of someone that wants to learn this sort of stuff - is it worth it to go do the cert stuff? It seems to me that its more of a you should know the stuff already and is just a cram session to pass the test and get your shiney piece of paper?

I don't know it already, which is why I want to learn it :)