The IT Essentials: PC Hardware and Software version 4 course in the Cisco® Networking Academy® is designed to prepare you to take and pass the CompTIA A+ exams based on the 2006 objectives. You must pass both the A+ Essentials and one of the technician exams to earn the A+ certification. Chapters 1 through 10 cover the foundational knowledge that aligns with the CompTIA A+ Essentials exam (220-601). Chapters 11 through 16 explore more advanced concepts in greater depth to prepare you for the specialized CompTIA A+ technician exams (220-602 for IT Technician, 220-603 for Remote Support Technician, and 220-604 for Bench Technician).

 

IT Essentials: PC Hardware and Software Labs and Study Guide, Third Edition, is designed as a valuable teaching and learning tool, incorporating new features to improve your hands-on skills and reinforce the key topics of the course. Each chapter contains a Study Guide section and a Labs section.

 

The Study Guide section is designed to provide additional exercises and questions to reinforce your understanding of the course topics, preparing you for the course assessments and focusing on preparing for the associated certification exams.

 

The Labs section features the complete collection of the lab exercises and worksheets specifically designed by Cisco to give students hands-on experience in a particular concept or technology.

 

Chapters 1–10 cover the following skills and competencies:

• Core competencies in the latest hardware and software technologies
• Information security skills
• Safety and environmental issues
• Soft skills for career development

 

Chapters 11–16 cover the following skills and competencies:

• Advanced troubleshooting skills
• Preparation for all three CompTIA job environment certification exams
• Advanced installation of computers, peripheral devices, networks, and security components

About the Author

Patrick Regan has been a PC technician, network administrator/engineer, design architect, and security analyst for the past 16 years after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Akron. He has taught many computer and network classes at Sacramento local colleges (Heald College and MTI College) and has participated in and led many projects (Heald College, Intel Corporation, Miles Consulting Corporation, and Pacific Coast Companies). For his teaching accomplishments, he received the Teacher of the Year award from Heald College, and he has received several recognition awards from Intel. Previously, he worked as a product support engineer for the Intel Corporation Customer Service, a senior network engineer for Virtual Alert supporting the BioTerrorism Readiness suite, and as a senior design architect/engineer and training coordinator for Miles Consulting Corp (MCC), a premiere Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and consulting firm. He is currently a senior network engineer at Pacific Coast Companies, supporting a large enterprise network. He holds many certifications, including the Microsoft MCSE, MCSA, MCT; the CompTIA A+, Network+, Server+, Linux+, Security+, and CTT+; the Cisco CCNA; and the Novell CNE and CWNP Certified Wireless Network Administrator (CWNA).

 

Over the past several years, he has written several textbooks for Prentice Hall, including Troubleshooting the PC, Networking with Windows 2000 and 2003, Linux, Local Area Networks, Wide Area Networks, and the Acing series (Acing the A+, Acing the Network+, Acing the Security+, and Acing the Linux+). He also coauthored Exam Cram 70-290 MCSA/MCSE Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment, Second Edition.

 

Now 100 percent updated for the latest technologies, this is today’s easiest, most visual guide to Cisco® networking. Even if you’ve never set up or managed a network, Cisco Networking Simplified, Second Edition, helps you quickly master the concepts you need to understand. Its full-color diagrams and clear explanations give you the big picture: how each important networking technology works, what it can do for you, and how they all fit together. The authors illuminate networking from the smallest LANs to the largest enterprise infrastructures, offering practical introductions to key issues ranging from security to availability, mobility to virtualization.

 

What you always wanted to know about networking but were afraid to ask!

• How networks and the Internet work
• How to build coherent, cost-effective network infrastructures
• How to design networks for maximum reliability and availability
• What you need to know about data center and application networking
• How to secure networks against today’s threats and attacks
• How to take advantage of the latest mobility technologies
• How virtualizing networks can help businesses leverage their network investments even further
• How to combine messaging, calendaring, telephony, audio, video, and web conferencing into a unified communications architecture

Security is a broad topic that is only becoming broader as we become more reliant on computers for everything we do, from work to home to leisure, and our computers become more and more interconnected. Most of our computing experiences now require, or are enriched by, Internet connections, which means our systems are constantly exposed to foreign data of unknown or uncertain integrity. When you click search links, download applications, or configure Internet-facing servers, every line of code through which the data flows is potentially subject to a storm of probing for vulnerable configuration, flawed programming logic, and buggy implementation—even within the confines of a corporate network. Your data and computing resources are worth money in the Web 2.0 economy, and where there’s money, there are people who want to steal it.

As the Web has evolved, we’ve also seen the criminals evolve. Ten years ago, the threat was an e-mail-borne macro virus that deleted your data. Five years ago, it was automatically propagating worms that used buffer overflows to enlist computers into distributed denial of service attack networks. Three years ago, the prevalent threat became malware that spreads to your computer when you visit infected websites and that subsequently delivers popup ads and upsells you rogue anti-malware. More recently, malware uses all these propagation techniques to spread into a stealthy distributed network of general-purpose “bots” that serve up your data, perform denial of service, or spew spam. The future is one of targeted malware that is deliberately low-volume and customized for classes of users, specific corporations, or even a single individual.

We’ve also seen computer security evolve. Antivirus is everywhere, from the routers on the edge to servers, clients, and soon, mobile devices. Firewalls are equally ubiquitous and lock down unused entry and exit pathways. Operating systems and applications are written with security in mind and are hardened with defense-in-depth measures such as no-execute and address layout randomization. Users can’t access corporate networks without passing health assessments.

One thing is clear: there’s no declaration of victory possible in this battle. It’s a constant struggle where winning means keeping the criminals at bay another day. And there’s also no clear cut strategy for success. Security in practice requires risk assessment, and successful risk assessment requires a deep understanding of both the threats and the defensive technologies.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry, ACRI 2006, held in Perpignan, France in September 2006.

The 53 revised full papers and 19 revised poster papers presented together with 6 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from around 100 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on CA theory and implementation, computational theory, population dynamics, physical modeling, urban, environmental and social modeling, traffic and boolean networks, multi-agents and robotics, crypto and security, dynamical systems, as well as crowds and cellular automata.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CaiSE 2003, held in Klagenfurt, Austria in June 2003.

The 45 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 219 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on XML, methods and models for information systems, UML, Internet business and social modeling, peer-to-peer systems, ontology-based methods, advanced design of information systems, knowledge, knowledge management, Web services, data warehouses, electronic agreements and workflow, requirements engineering, metrics and method engineering, and agent technologies and advanced environments.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Extending Database Technology, EDBT 2004, held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece, in March 2004.

The 42 revised full papers presented together with 2 industrial application papers, 15 software demos, and 3 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 294 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on distributed, mobile and peer-to-peer database systems; data mining and knowledge discovery; trustworthy database systems; innovative query processing techniques for XML data; data and information on the web; query processing techniques for spatial databases; foundations of query processing; advanced query processing and optimization; query processing techniques for data and schemas; multimedia and quality-aware systems; indexing techniques; and imprecise sequence pattern queries.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International XML Database Symposium, XSym 2003, held in Berlin, Germany in September 2003.

The 18 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on XML-relational database management systems, XML query processing, systems and tools for XML data processing, XML access structures, stream processing and updates, and design issues.

Beginning in 1999, the database research literature has seen an explosion of publications with the goal of using an RDBMS to store and/or query XML data. The problems addressed and solved in this area are diverse. Some publications deal with using an RDBMS to store XML data; others deal with exporting existing relational data in an XML view. The papers use a wide variety of XML query languages, including subsets of XQuery, XML-QL, XPath, and even “oneoff” new proposals; they use a wide variety of languages or ad-hoc constructs to map between the relational and XML schema; and they differ widely in what they “push to SQL” and what they evaluate in middleware.

This diversity renders it difficult to know how the various results presented fit  together, and even makes it hard to know what if any open problems remain. As a first step to rectifying this situation, we present a classification of the problem space and discuss how almost 40 papers fit into this classification. As a result of this study, we find that some basic questions are still open. In particular, for the XML publishing of relational data and for “schema-based” shredding of XML documents into relations, there is no published algorithm for translating even simple path expression queries (with the // axis) into SQL when the XML schema is recursive. It is our hope that this paper will stimulate others to refine our classification and, more importantly, to improve the state of the art and to address and solve the open problems that the classification reveals.