Initial Review - IPExpert Video on Demand

So I mentioned earlier that I had ordered some workbooks from IPexpert which was part of one of the bundles they were offering.

As the Volume 1 and Volume 3 workbooks arrived before the R&S Video on Demand Course I did quickly flicked through the volume 1 lab workbook and took the opportunity (or excuse) to fiddle around a little and redesign my lab a little to suit (mainly to support virtual hosts into the design which I will write about that in a later post)

Anyhow - the material for this course consists of a single DVD which has 4 relatively long days of material on it simulating I guess what you may get if you were able to travel to an actual bootcamp delivered by Joe Astorino who was an IPExpert student prior to becoming one of their instructors.  Accompanying the DVD (which is a data disk, not a video disk) is a nearly 400 pages of slides as a hard copy of the slides that are presented in the video - with space below to scribble your own notes in and a separate 19 page topology diagram book which is used in the exercises.

So far I have watched all of the Day 1 Material (Focusing briefly on Study techniques before diving deep into Layer 2 technologies) and some of the Day 4 stuff (I jumped to the back because I was interested in hearing Joe's troubleshooting tips and ideas on navigating the "doc cd")

The method of delivery is firstly to discuss the technology concepts with a lecture component - primarily slide based and then to have some configuration exercises that are a basically form a small lab exercising various constraints that utilise the previously discussed topics and techniques.  The examples are actually pretty good in that you see sometimes Joe has (or appears to have) a bit of a mental block on what to do but you see how he resolves the problem (mainly by checking the doc cd) and also once or twice he introduced a couple of errors into his configs but due to his approach of validating things as you go, you can see him isolate where the issue is and correct it - which is actually pretty good in that it is basically a live demonstration on verification and picking up your mistakes without getting flustered.

If I was to directly compare this with the Audio Boot Camp - the VoD would win hands down - that's not to denigrate the audio material at all, the video just has the advantage of having the slide pack but more importantly because there are diagrams and live updates as to what is happening in the CLI, the lab exercises provide that bit of extra clarity that an audio only class cannot provide.  However while standing on packed train during rush hour, it's easier to focus on the audio material that it would be to watch a video (I don't think the video would do well on a small display really, especially for the config sections)

So while I have only viewed about a quarter of the material so far, I cant see any negatives to report and I am pleased with my purchase and again have been learning new concepts particularly on frame-relay and look forward to learning more in the routing protocols, security, qos, multicast, ipv6 and MPLS areas.

My current plan is to go through the VoD in full once before I start on the Volume 1 workbook labs and after each lab revise the topic on the area that seems to cause me dramas.