front matter

 

preface

In 2018, as a junior high school English teacher in the city of Kobe, Japan, I found myself at a crossroads. What I had originally intended to be a brief teaching stint in Japan had stretched into four years, and I was reaching the limit of my stay. I was in Japan on the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme, a program sponsored by the Japanese government to bring recent university graduates to Japan to teach English for up to 5 years. As my tenure neared its end, I pondered my next step.

Being fascinated with computers since childhood, I found the field of IT a natural choice. I was no computer wizard—I had no experience in programming or anything of the sort—but after some searching, I stumbled upon the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) certification. If the stories were to be believed, getting CCNA certified was the gateway to a promising career in IT with a decent salary and plenty of room for growth. After a bit of studying, I was hooked! Peering under the hood of networks like the internet—an ubiquitous part of the modern world—was (and still is) endlessly fascinating.

acknowledgments

about this book

Who should read this book

How this book is organized

About Cisco CLI commands and output formatting

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Other online resources

about the author

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