this is short article, But I want to walk through a comprehensive plan. I'Ve put together for the cisco certified definite associate certification. I decided to use an Excel spreadsheet to create this plan, Because I don't want to create technological barriers for entry for people who might be new to this environment. I'm pretty sure everyone knows how to use a spreadsheet so we'll just keep it simple.
The spreadsheet has two tabs. The first tab is just basic notes and the second tab is the plan. So, Let's cover the notes quickly. First, I have a link to the official Cisco website that describes the certification in detail to earn this cert.
You only need to pass one task, Which is dev, Ask and I'll just be referring to the certification by using that short name. This plan is ten weeks long and I've allocated about 10 to 12 hours per week to study, I think, For a certification at this level. This is a pretty reasonable amount of time.
If you can only do half that much then spread the plain over 20 weeks. Instead, The main point is that you do everything in order. I'Ve decided to restrict this plan to only three types of resources. The first and primary resource is going to be courses on Pluralsight if you haven't used plural sight before it's a low-cost, High-quality training provider.
Initially Pluralsight was very focused on software developers and only recently moved into the IT operations world like networking and system administrators. As a result, There is a lot of really excellent developer content here, Making it a good choice for this particular certification. Another huge component to this plan is the free dev net resources hosted by Cisco. These are official Cisco resources like Learning Labs, Sandboxes forums, Training, Articles, You name it.
I'Ve linked a lot of those into the plan to give you some additional hands-on using Cisco resources. Last, There was a lot of really good content out there, That's free like from blog posts or EveDumps articles, Or even some free books or white papers. This is a good way to get additional perspectives on the technologies that you're learning about. At the time of this recording the total cost of this plan is probably somewhere around 100 US dollars. That's like the cost of one textbook, So I feel like this plan is going to give you a lot of bang for your buck at a very low cost.
As you'll see on the next tab, I've highlighted my own personal contributions using green. I did that because I want to highlight that I'm only a small player in this overall plan in terms of hours. My content only makes up about 22% of the total. That means 78% of the content I'm recommending in this plan was done by other people. I truly believe that this is the best strategy for learning so that you get lots of different perspectives and varying levels of depth into the different technologies as you're moving through the plan.
If you have questions or suggestions for improvement, Please contact me. I'Ve included a link to my website here, As well as the name of the website, Njr USMC net, And you can go to my about page to get my contact info. I want to talk briefly about this copyright notice, Because there's only two things I'm trying to do here. First, I want to make clear that I want people to download this and I want people to edit it for their personal use. So if you want to highlight individual rows in the plan with a different color to indicate progress or if you want to add a column with a percent indicator, That indicates your progress, That's fine! In fact, I would encourage you to do those things. What's not allowed.
Is downloading this document editing out all the Pluralsight courses with some other training provider and then redistributing that? Please respect that this document took me about 20 hours of hard work to research and put together so I'd appreciate if you didn't edit out my specific content. All that being said, Let's check out the plan on the next tab. Before we talk about the topics, Let me just talk about the way the sheet is organized. Hopefully it doesn't need much explanation, As it should be pretty straightforward.
Unlike a lot of resource documents, I didn't want to put all the blueprint topics on the left and the resources on the right that can be useful if you're looking for specific resources to match up with a specific topic area. But in my opinion, The more comprehensive approach is to create a Tom base plan that tells you what to do. I'Ve also included a column that indicates which blueprint topics are addressed in every row, So that you still have some way to map blueprint topics to individual resources. You can always use control F to search for specific blueprint topics.
If you want to see what resources you could look at after building content for this course, I realize the only skill you need is basic Python skills. To begin, I decided not to spend an hour teaching Python basics in the beginning of my course, And just made an assumption that people taking the course would know the very fundamentals if you've never touched Python before or if you're just very weak with the language. I'Ve included a five hour fundamentals course on Pluralsight, Which I think is excellent following that course. I have a few simple challenges.
I found online that I think were good indicators of the skills needed for this particular class. There are many more challenges on that website, But I picked a few that I think were highly relevant and that would challenge you to test your skills before continuing one of the first things that I do in my series. Is we create a flask app that we use for testing throughout? Most of the course that's why I've included a few modules from a flask course on Pluralsight to give you some basic understanding of how it works now? Actually, Understanding flask specifically isn't really in scope. However, Building a web service using the flask framework is going to give you some knowledge around HTTP, So it is relevant to a few blueprint topics. Next, We begin with one of my Pluralsight courses, Which talks about software development, Lifecycle strategies and design patterns.
You can go into more detail using a couple different Pluralsight courses like on scrum and Kanban or you're good things to know and t're short courses, So pretty enjoyable. Another thing worth noting is that learning basics of bash are actually in the blueprint. So I cover this in my course, But if you want a little more detail, I've included some other Pluralsight training that can give you more context around how bash works.
Now I know all of you can read, So I'm not going to go through this entire document line by line to list every resource and justify why it's on here. At this point I'll pick up the pace a little bit just to explain high level. What's going on week by week, The rest of week, Two we focus on git and github integration and here's where we start to introduce some definite learning labs. These can be really useful to test your skills after you've learned the basics from the Pluralsight training.
In a week, Three I introduce apI's and also how to use different definite resources on the topic of API. Is you need to have a good understanding of HTTP rest as well as important tools like postman and curl, In order to test our API knowledge? We need some API to test on. I felt like this was a good opportunity to introduce Cisco DNA Center and the reason I like this product is because number one there's an always-on sandbox in dev net, Making it easy to test and number two.
The API is very strong and very well documented. So it's a great place to start. This also includes a few challenges that you can do on your own time to make sure that you're understanding the content week. Four is where we introduce a lot of different Cisco products on the blueprint there's about 15 different Cisco products, But in terms of writing code, You need to know about five or six. I cover them in my course at a basic level and we use a variety of different API scripts to interact with the different products.
You'll notice that there's a very heavy influence on dev net learning, Labs and EveDumps articles. A lot of these EveDumps articles are actually published by Cisco that talk about product capabilities and then, In addition, The dev net learning lab can give you some hands-on experience working with these different products. Once you understand about apI's, We talked about how applications get deployed and, More specifically, Where I talk about the trade-offs between a public cloud versus private versus hybrid versus edge computing.
Then we talk about virtualization options like containers, Bare metal or virtual machines. There's also a good amount of docker here, So I cover it in my course and we go through building a docker file, Docker izing, The flask app we wrote earlier and using docker compose, But I include more detailed resources for those specific technologies, Because I believe docker Is very important and something you absolutely need to know to get through this certification. We finish up this week with an intro to DevOps and rather than jump into Learning Labs.
I figured we finish the week, Giving you some context, So you'll notice that it's mostly EveDumps articles. I want to introduce you to different flavors of DevOps, Like network oriented, DevOps security, Oriented DevOps, And I also want to talk about test-driven development, Because when you start to implement, For example, A CI pipeline you're, Probably going to want to consider using TDD to write your Tests and develop your software along that strategy week six begins with a CI CD overview and again a good amount of EveDumps here, As well as some floral site courses to teach you how to build a CI pipeline. I'Ve also included a few of my own EveDumps articles here because t show a different perspective on CI CD. In my cases, I use one example to maintain my personal website and then the other I publish a book. The goal is to show you that CI CD is more than just maintaining code projects or applications running in production anytime.
You need to deliver continuous value sooner. CI CD is something to consider provided you're working with some kind of technical project, And in these cases I found some unique ways to make that work in my favor. We finish up this week by talking about security, So there are a handful of really good Pluralsight courses that cover the different o wasp top 10 threats, As well as common threats like SQL injection, CSRF, Cross-site, Scripting, Etc. I also include a little bit of secret management here, So different vault technologies. How can we use environment variables instead of statically defining our credentials? Those are pretty important things to know.
Week 7, We jump into network fundamentals. I suspect that many of you reading this article are already network engineers and you're, Probably going to be generally strong in this area. If that's true week, 7 will be a very easy week for you, And you may want to use it to do something else. Maybe remediate other things that you need more work on, Or maybe just take a week off.
I cover these fundamentals in about 30 minutes within my course, But if you want to go deeper and get hands-on with these technologies and really understand them, There's a good 5 and 1/2 hour course on Pluralsight that can give you those skills. So if you're, Currently a database administrator or a software developer and you're, Not very strong with networks, I think that would be a good resource. I'Ve also included a one-hour course that talks about the high-level building blocks within a campus like the internet edge the LAN block, The e-commerce module the data center. Things like that, If you're not familiar with those terms that one our course can give you some context around how networks are built within the enterprise.
I finish up the week by talking about the common IP services. We need to know for the exam. The good news is that Pluralsight has deep dive courses on most of these different technologies, Like DHCP, DNS, Etc. In my course, I describe these at a high level and use some packet captures to help explain it.
I also include some of the introductory modules from the deep dive courses again just to give you a different perspective on how these technologies work week. 8 is probably the most fun week of the whole plan. Infrastructure is code, Is a combination of technologies that ties together. Lots of different things so far, We've learned about docker we've learned about version control.
We'Ve learned about how CIC D works. We learned about apI's a lot of that comes together when we talk about infrastructure as code. So, First, When we talk about tools, There are some Cisco specific tools like viral and PI ATS, And I've got some resources there, Including some learning labs that you can mess around with those. There are also commercial tools like ansible, Puppet and chef, Which are in scope.
So resources for those two towards the end of this week, We move into three big and seemingly scary topics, Namely net conf, Rest, Conf and yang. I cover these in pretty good detail within my course probably more than the blueprint needs, But these are really critical topics. It's very easy to conceptually understand how these protocols work, But actually being able to use them in a simple way takes a lot of effort. I strongly recommend going through these EveDumps articles, The Pluralsight courses and the definite learning labs to really master these technologies, Because I truly believe that these are the future of networked automation.
I also recommend viewing a few modules from my existing ansible and Python Network automation courses, Because I show some other specific real-life examples of how we can use net conf yang and also rest comp to program Network Devices using those apI's instead of SSH CLI based management. In week, 9, Second to last week, My recommendation is: take it easy and go through this really awesome. Article series that my friend Hank Preston did over at dev net it's about 10 hours long and it covers a lot of different blueprint topics and the focus is on how to go from being a network engineer to a network automation engineer what's different: why is it Relevant, What are the different technologies involved, And he shows you some really good examples of how all that works again. This is another way to get a fresh perspective on all the technologies we've talked about, Which again gives you some additional context and understanding.
The last week is also pretty basic. At this point, You will have already readed a EveDumps article that describes how my evolving technology book is published. Well, At this stage, I'm actually asking you to read the book. The first three sections correlate to the sections on the CCI II and CCD your written exams, Namely cloud network program ability and IOT.
This is highly relevant for the dev ask blueprint as it covers many of the topics and you can probably get through it in about 4 hours. So again we have a combination of labs articles, Hands-on courses, Tutorials challenges and text books. The last thing I recommend you do is go through all of my specific Pluralsight courses, One more time these courses were specifically designed to cover the skills needed to get you ready for this specific dev ask certification through the first nine weeks, The different modules from these Courses were kind of split up so that you could go deeper into each technology area.
At this point, We're trying to laser focus on those specific topics so just read the courses straight through and you'll see that there's kind of a storyline or scenario that weaves its way through the whole process. You'll also notice that my courses generally align with the way the blueprint is organized from top to bottom, For example. My first course covers most of section 1 & 2. My second course covers most of section 3 & 4, And my last course covers most of sections.
5 & 6 - I use the word most because sometimes there are topics that I moved between courses, For example, Test-driven development was in section 1, But it didn't really make sense to talk about there. It made more sense to talk about it within the context of C ICD. In the second course, You might see a little bit of mix-and-match there. But again, If you read these three courses in series you're going to get the full experience of everything needed on the blueprint before we wrap up.
I have two more points that are probably obvious, But I want to verbalize them first. This is a comprehensive plan, But that doesn't mean I've listed every single resource in the universe. That might be helpful for this test. There are a lot more things on definite likes and boxes that I haven't linked and other article series that you might find useful at some point.
I'm sure large publishers are going to have textbooks that cover these topics as well. I think all of that's great and if you have recommendations for improvement again, Please contact me. My second point is that, At some point some of you are gonna contact me and have recommendations for improvement and I'm going to agree with them.
That means this documents going to be updated. Quite a lot I'll provide a link to this document in the description section below if you're actively studying for the test. I suggest you check for updates every few weeks to make sure you're looking at the latest and greatest that about wraps it up for today.
Now that you have known about the fact, you must be attracted to achieving it. If you wish to have it, you must have to do lots and lots of studies, unless you have a good and reliable 300-620 DCACI Dumps provider like that of the EveDumps.
