I got a 799/900, so ~88%. I finished in about 75 mins.

I studied on and off for about 3 months, really only getting serious the last few weeks.

I have done a couple years of contract helpdesk on and off during Covid. I also have a little homelab with a proxmox setup with homeassistant and pihole, and a few Pis running octoprint for my printers. So I am not an expert by any means, but I am comfortable with SSH and CLI stuff.

The materials I used were:

Professor Messer's Network+ videos on YT. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLG49S3nxzAnl_tQe3kvnmeMid0mjF8Le8

A great overview of what you need to know, taught well, in easily digestible chunks. Make sure you know ALL of the things in his videos very well. I've noticed he occasionally moves past somethings quickly that are important. But as always he is the gold standard, you can't go wrong with his material. I didn't get his practice test because its a PDF and I do not have the self discipline to not peek at answers. If you are not like me then its probably excellent.

Jason Dion's Udemy course w/ practice test - Its on sale like all the time, dont pay $100 or whatever.

As always he teaches you more than you need to know. I like this, because if I can learn what hes teaching I am good to go for the test. I would recommend his videos after Prof Messer's though, to make sure you already have a handle on the core concepts before you attempt his material. His material can be a bit overwhelming if you're hearing it for the first time. His practice tests are harder than the actual test's multiple choice sections by a wide margin.

TIA-Andrew Ramdayal's Udemy practice tests and his study guide. I didn't use his course because I didn't know he existed until I was almost near the end of my studying. I like his teaching style though. I will probably get his course for my next cert.

His study guide is free and EXCELLENT. its in the description of the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd4lCBjttgU I made physical flashcards of everything on here.

I also did his free online practice test https://youtu.be/T1_pf-7k2E0?si=8pzL4hhXA5KsgQ7- I absolutely recommend it, he explains the answers very well.

I then got his pack of practice tests on Udemy. Generally pretty good, about as hard as the multiple choice part of the actual test IMO(I got the exact same score on the real test as I got on my last test of his). There were a couple of shitty semantics questions but I mean CompTIA loves those so, you know, it was probably for the best that they are in there.

My practice test scores right before taking it were:

For my particular exam I had 80 questions with 6 PBQs. Only 2 Subnetting specific questions, but subnetting knowledge was a significant part of a few others. So no avoiding subnetting, you'll need it. My favorite quick subnetting method was Jason Dion's "subnetting by hand".

There were very few "WHAT IS THE EXACT SPEED OF THIS CABLE/STANDARD/etc?" and a lot more real world "which would you choose to solve this issue?". Don't just memorize, comprehend.

SO for the elephant in the room, for the PBQs you absolutely NEED to be familiar with the outputs of the CLI commands. Like this is non negotiable, you will poop the bed if you don't know how to use them. Play around with your PC's CMD when you're learning the ping/ipconfig/arp/tracert/etc commands. Get packet tracer(its free from Cisco) and learn it and set up a couple little networks then use it to practice the show commands on switches. Know where you would go to find an IP/MAC/Interface/VLAN/etc in the switch CLI outputs. This is critical. Supposedly Andrew Ramdayal has some labs in his course that teach you this stuff. Jason Dion did have nice highlighted outputs in his videos to point out the important stuff. Like its not a lot to learn and only requires a few hours, but if you are trying to learn how to read those outputs during the test you're gonna run out of time.

Overall, it was difficult, but not insurmountable. My total financial investment in prep material was like $20-$30 since you just wait for the Udemy sales which seems like its every day or whatever.