Study Strategies and Exam Tips

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Learning Objectives

Build a habit of labbing every command instead of just reading it
Use the 'teach it back' test to check real understanding
Build a simple spaced-review tracker

Five Things That Actually Work

Lab everything -- reading commands isn't the same as knowing them. Build a command cheat sheet as you go, kebab-case file per topic. Teach it back: if you can explain ACLs to a friend in plain English, you get it; if not, you memorized it. Chunk by 'why' not just 'how' -- know why `ip access-group 110 in` uses `in` and not `out`. The day before the exam: don't cram new topics, redo your cheat sheet from memory and patch the gaps.

📝 Exercise: Build a Spaced-Review Tracker

Write a function topics_due_for_review(topics, today) that takes a list of {'topic': str, 'last_reviewed_day': int} dicts and an integer 'today', and returns the names of topics where today - last_reviewed_day >= 3 (due for another pass).

code.py

topics = [
    {"topic": "ACLs", "last_reviewed_day": 1},
    {"topic": "SNMP", "last_reviewed_day": 5},
    {"topic": "NetFlow", "last_reviewed_day": 6},
]
today = 8

def topics_due_for_review(topics, today):
    return [
        t["topic"] for t in topics
        if today - t["last_reviewed_day"] >= 3
    ]

print("Review today:", topics_due_for_review(topics, today))

Output

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