Having taken the ONT, I can tell you this, You don't need any of the wireless equipment. It was very straight forward. All I used for equipment was a pair of spare routers and simulated a point to point t1 across them to practice a little QoS. I found it to be the easiest exam I've taken, but also had a lot of work experience with QoS and wireless over the year prior to taking the exam.
BOSON has a great simulator for labs. But I still think nothing beats getting your hands on the real thing. I'm still building out my home lab, am constantly looking for deals on equipment for things I think I will want. I was fortuneate at the time of going through my CCNP tests, to have some spare switches and a lot of old 2500 series routers to play with.
Books, books are always a big topic it seems. For the CCNP there used to be (since the courses changed not 100% sure it's the same) 2 books for each test. The "self-study" and the "exam certification guide" from Cisco Press. I recommend starting with the Self-study books. These follow the official student courseware, almost verbatim and lay a great foundation behind a lot of the topics. The exam certification guides assume you already have the foundation, and I found were harder to read than the others.
The Exam Certification guides also came with a CD that had a pdf copy of the book as well as a little practice test engine. It was more just the end of chapter questions, but I found it nice to still have it copied onto my laptop so even at work I could take 5 minutes every now and then and do a few questions just to keep fresh at different times.
The other place to go is Cisco's website, I've put together an FAQ on here with a lot of help from Burt and others with a bunch of different links for extra information both from Cisco's website and other sites as we've found them.
CiscoGuy is right, we all say practice, practice, practice. I spent a lot of late nights at the office (because I didn't have my home lab at the time) building my own lab scenarios, running debugs, taking notes, diagramming, running packet traces. All to get a better inside look at OSPF adjacencies, Spanning-tree, EIGRP, etc.
I understand what you mean about selecting radio buttons for answers. Personally I'm not a test taker so I usually struggle getting through the exams. A co-worker and I both went through the CCNP process at the same time. He could read the books do a little practice and go take the test. I on the other hand would have to read the books twice taking extra good notes, and sometimes take the test twice....a couple 3 times. The bigger difference for us is after the test...not wanting to sound like I'm bragging here, but a lot of people around us recognize this too, and he's even said it. When there is a problem, I'm the one they want working on it. I'm able to navigate my way through it and understand better what is going on and what impacts will be. I've witnessed a few times where he has completely forgotten how 'moving this connection' will impact spanning-tree, causing a nice little loop for about 10 minutes.
