Looking for a sale on computer programming books? Gotcha covered!

[thewayne]

Packt Publishing is having their end of year sale, all of their ebooks and apparently their video courses are $5! I just purchased a CCNA course for $20, which was three ebooks and a complete video course, normal cost would be around $260! I formerly was CCNA certified and have been thinking about doing a refresher and maybe reacquiring that cert. I know they expanded the knowledge required to include firewall configuration, so it should be interesting, plus now everything is GUI-based for router/firewall configuration compared to all of the command-line stuff that I had to know. Plus my knowledge of IPv6 is really dated as back when I was certified it was REALLY early v6, I have no idea how they're doing routing of it these days. Should be interesting.

Sale should be running until about the end of the year if past trends are any indication. Their books are typically in PDF, Epub, or Kindle format, all DRM-free. Some time in January they'll go back to having one book a day available for free: I've acquired approx 500 ebooks and many zip files of code samples this way over the years. Many topics that I have no personal interest in currently, but you never know when interests might change and you need to bone up on something.

https://www.packtpub.com/

Comments

[kraig]

I've never had any kind of certification, despite now having a fairly senior position. I figured I might as well see about a CCNA. :) Thanks for this!

[thewayne]

Happy to help! Even though I've never been a high-level server or network admin, I have found the knowledge that I got from my previous CCNA education to be quite interesting and occasionally useful. Just understanding how IP addresses and subnet masking works has proven quite valuable. I've even made firewall changes and understood what I was doing!

Here's the books that I bought:
CCNA Routing and Switching 200-125 Certification Guide by Lazaro (Laz) Diaz|
CCNA Security 210-260 Certification Guide by Glen D. Singh, Michael Vinod, Vijay Anandh
CCENT/CCNA: ICND1 100-105 Certification Guide by Bekim Dauti
Cisco CCNA 200-125 - The Complete Guide to Getting Certified [Video] by Neil Anderson

Hopefully you can still get them all for $5 each!

[kraig]

I think I got those ones, I'll double-check.

The funny thing is, I've never held a formal certification. The extent of my formal studies is a BA in history, although I've enough other credits I could have minored in psychology or philosophy (and I've nearly enough for a major in either). Yet on the strength of being a competent enough sysadmin, I now make daily decisions affecting the entire university's network (about 34k undergrads, 1.5k faculty, 2k staff, 5k or so grad students), including things like firewall changes, allocating networks, compliance, etc. I don't know if that's a happy or a sad face.

I have a staff member with a CISSP, although he actually completed studies after he joined our staff, and his working towards same wasn't a primary motivation in why we hired him.

Mostly, what I know I've picked up by either self-study or by learning from other people who knew more than I do. Fortunately, I've been surrounded by the latter, and I seem to do ok at the former. But the idea of an Actual! Certification! is kind of neat.

Anyway, thanks again. :)