Depending on what you're looking at setting up you can also see about picking up some older Cisco gear. When I was studying for the CCNA I picked up a couple of

Depending on what you're looking at setting up you can also see about picking up some older Cisco gear. When I was studying for the CCNA I picked up a couple of 2500 series routers off of eBay for ~$80 shipped. They were a generation or two out of date at the time, but I picked up some newer IOS images off of a torrent site and was able to use them to experiment with most of the topics covered. I imagine a couple of older routers/switches for the hands-on experience combined with simulation software for more complex setups would still get you pretty far.