Meet Your Teachers
Kevin Moran is an engineer with over 10 years of experience in network design, administration and implementation, managing network operations across enterprise environments.
Fabrice David is a teacher, trainer, and instructor trainer on the Cisco Networking Academy (NetAcad) program since 2002. He has trained hundreds of pupils, students, and teachers on Cisco technology via the Cisco training program.
How to Approach This Course
This course is a natural progression from Set up TCP/IP networks, so I’d strongly advise you to take that course if you haven't already, because it covers some of the key networking concepts within Cisco Packet Tracer.
This course is more than just a simple introduction to the tool. I suggest you follow just one or several parts of the course, depending on your level of knowledge. And based on your learning experience, you can come back to the course later.
To follow this course, you’ll need to download and install Cisco Packet Tracer on your computer. If you’ve already downloaded and installed it, you can go straight to the next part.
Within the chapters, you’ll find text content and screencasts. The text content is there to explain the key concepts. These concepts will be brought to life using a professional case study.
The screencasts are videos of my screen recordings and are designed to complement the textual content.
The chapters are grouped into four parts. At the end of each part, you can test your knowledge with a quiz. By successfully completing the quiz, you’ll earn course certification.
Let’s take a look at our case study, which will provide the basis for us to learn about the key concepts in network device configuration.
Introducing the Case Study for the Course
Here are some details about the organization we’re using for our case study: Theobald Digital Agency
Theobald Digital Agency provides a number of different services to their clients across the globe:
Strategy
Design
Development
Marketing
The different departments at Theobald are located in various different offices:
Executive
HR
IT
Accounting
Operations
Marketing
Sales
Customer Service
But why is it important to understand the different services within an organization when I’m just a network administrator?
Well, the way you organize your IT network is usually related to the way the different services within the organization operate, so it’s essential to fully understand the organizational structure. We’ll come back to this point as we progress through the course, so don’t worry.
Here’s the network diagram that we're going to create in Packet Tracer:
Let's Recap!
In this chapter, you’ve seen:
how best to approach this course.
the prerequisites for taking this course, i.e., completion of the Set up TCP/IP networks course.
the case study project you’ll be using to acquire the knowledge you need to configure your network devices using Cisco Packet Tracer.
Now that we’ve given you an introduction to this course, in the next chapter you're going to create an account on Cisco NetAcad and also download Cisco Packet Tracer.
