I started my preparation for this exam by completing the CCNP certification. This gave me the foundation on which I need to build.
The next step was to research the postings at Groupstudy.com. There I found lots of useful info from folks who have taken the exam already as well people like myself, just starting out. Lots of the questions related to the ones I had at the time, like, where to start and what materials to cover, knowing, that this, being an exam at the highest level, you would be expected to know everything.
On advice from a few people and a CCIE who works with me I went out and bought the CISCO Certification: Bridges, Routers & Switches for CCIEs by Caslow. Read this twice and then moved on to the Token Ring White paper from CCPrep.com. It took me a while to get my head around this. But one day at work Koen had this DLSw fault, so he sat down and worked out the RIFs with the least amount of effort, while I sat there scratching my brain. It was then that I realized the essence of the subject was knowing how to count in hex. I went on my way and after sitting down trying to fathom this out I found that this was so easy. Now that I had that sorted, I had no problems with RIFs, the rest fell into place.
I then bought the Boson tests, borrowed the Beachfront software and used those
for the rest of my preparation. The Boson tests are really good they have some
good explanations and good links for further study and more detailed
explanations. If you can afford it these are a good investment. That is
something that I am discovering as well, in order to get a good library going
for future reference and to aid in my study I am having to spend a lot more than
I spent for the professional level stuff. I have no doubt that this will be
money well spent though.
Something else I should mention is that I work on networks everyday, all day, we provide remote management for 5000+ devices and being a Telco our support is from layer one up, although the layer one and two stuff are taken care off by other areas of the company. We have general moves adds and changes, network management and monitoring tasks and then the very complex troubleshooting issues sometimes requiring the assistance of TAC. We also have a couple of CCIE's on our floor which helps when you need to ask a quick question or two, this is provided you have done enough ground work first. Devices we support are from Cisco, Nortel, Nokia, 3Com & the likes. I have constant hands on and that has been they key to my advancements this far.
You can find links to the resources mentioned above as well as others on our CCIE & General Links Pages.
CISCO Certification: Bridges, Routers & Switches for CCIEs by Andrew Bruce Caslow, Valeriy Pavlichenko - second edition
Cisco CCNP Preparation Library: Cisco Press
Token Ring White Paper
Hands on is the key, as much as you can get ☺