Networking Intro/About this course

There are a lot of resources out there for teaching yourself basic networking / network administration. Many of them are expensive. Others are poorly organized or incomplete (or worse, incorrect). The purpose of this course is to give you a solid foundation to build upon, not to boggle you with the intricacies of the OSI model or prepare you (only) for a certification exam.

Many community colleges and universities are offering Network Intro courses to prepare the students to pass industry certifications. Some well-known entry level certifcations are CompTIA's Network+ and Cisco's CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) cerfiticates. Cisco Networking Academy is the largest computer networking education agency in the world.

Contributions to the course are welcome, and in the Wikipedia spirit you should be bold. As a recommendation, though, please consider opening a new course if the contribution is sufficiently in-depth or technical.

Structure

The structure used for each topic in this course is:

• Outline
• Discussion
• Activities
• Resources

The structure and style borrows heavily from the excellent example at Web Design. It is the goal of this course to exemplify both education and innovation, and a standard course format is not required. This is entirely a work in progress - you might even say, an experiment.

Group use

Ideally the material here would be suitable for self-study and group use without modification. Perhaps an additional section at the end of each topic should be added, suggesting additional activities for a group that don't diminish the value of self-study, but encourage communication (utterly essential for this discipline) and foster creative (viral?) learning.