eastinthewest,
The one thing you did not say was that you have a home CCNA lab for hands-on practice - not a sim but a real Cisco lab! 3 routers and 2 switches.
One that you went out and researched the different routers, learned and understood the different cables, IOS, DRAM, FLASH etc. Then you set it all up and configured them from scatch, hooked the Ethernet cables to a switch, setup VLANs, connected some old PCs and got them to telnet accross the routers to the different network pieces, understanding gateways, IPs, subnet masks etc.
In the lab you setup RIP, changed it to RIP v2 and then to EIGRP or OSPF in a single area, disconnect a cable and run some "show" commands and see what has changed.
Then you setup ACLs so that computer 1 can not ping computer 2 ..........
The idea is that you need to read the books - then go onto your lab and try it out - nothing beats having to make it work - not drag and drop it into place in a sim
Hands-on is so important!
E.A. Broda
CCNA, CCDA, CCAI, Network +