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Reddit mentions of RHCSA/RHCE Red Hat Linux Certification Study Guide, Seventh Edition (Exams EX200 & EX300)
Sentiment score: 21
Reddit mentions: 37
We found 37 Reddit mentions of RHCSA/RHCE Red Hat Linux Certification Study Guide, Seventh Edition (Exams EX200 & EX300). Here are the top ones.
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IMO; The fastest IT career to get into is in Linux Administration. I don't know how your job scene is over there in the UK, but from my experience in the US it's pretty happening.
You can get started in under 3 months with under a grand and get a job making 50-60k starting.
Here's how:
https://www.amazon.com/RHCSA-Linux-Certification-Study-Seventh/dp/0071841962/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1523303112&sr=8-1&keywords=jang+linux
https://www.offensive-security.com/
If you wanna stay an admin go down the architect route with Redhat.
Knock knock Neo.
>The instructor for the class told us to just init 5 when we get to a terminal and use the GUI for everything and we'd sail through it. But, I never got there because I got locked out with no root password, and didn't think that'd be the first thing they served up.
was this a certified RHEL trainer or some 3rd party random " I know linux" class? Because init its gone and changing the number in init does not boot you into root no more. With systemd its a little more complicated process. Red Hat does not even test on version 6 no more. Check out https://www.certdepot.net/ they have listed the process very well. This book is good too https://www.amazon.com/RHCSA-Linux-Certification-Seventh-Career/dp/0071841962/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1491878007&sr=1-1&keywords=red+hat
Essential Reading:
Go through the AWS Certified SysOps course over at acloud.guru, and get an RHCSA and maybe an RHCE through Michael Jang. Might take you a few months but that should be enough to get you interviewing for a Junior Linux Admin role successfully and start making the switch.
Get your RHCSA and then your RHCE. For learning/study resources I recommend LinuxAcademy along with Jang's book (https://www.amazon.com/RHCSA-Linux-Certification-Study-Seventh/dp/0071841962). Even studying for and getting your RHCSA will teach you a bunch of fundamental Linux skills. RH certifications are also among the more respected certs in the industry.
I finished my RHCSA with a perfect score using only one resource. While getting access to official Red Hat resources could be better, if you have to fund this yourself, this is the best option for the money. Michael Jang helped me pass my RHCSA on RHEL6 and then again on RHEL7, with the current exam getting a perfect score. All you need to do is follow what is in the book and you'll have no problems passing. Just do the labs thoroughly enough until you no longer need to reference any help material and you'll be fine.
https://www.amazon.com/RHCSA-Linux-Certification-Study-Seventh/dp/0071841962/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1508331478&sr=8-1&keywords=michael+jang
Don't listen to the useless advice that says just keep installing and smashing your head against the keyboard until you learn something. Follow a course that gives you a study guide and an organized approach to the topic and you will faster, and better.
The topics are presented in a logical order that build upon each other.
Study for the RHCSA and go get it. The bonus is at the end of the day you can also get a job with it.
Resources (these two should be all you need):
https://www.amazon.com/RHCSA-Linux-Certification-Study-Seventh/dp/0071841962/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1468515373&sr=1-1&keywords=rhcsa+7
https://linuxacademy.com/
The best way to learn is to use it as your primary system, and you'll learn as you have to solve problems. If you're looking to learn its recommended you use something that isn't going to abstract everything like Ubuntu or Linux Mint does, and use something such as Debian etc. (or if you're adventurous and really want to accelerate your learning, Gentoo or others) where you're a bit more involved with less hand holding.
Since you're also wanting to peruse it for purposes of future career options, depending upon your location (NA or Europe) you'll see quite a bit of value from Red Hat certs if you're located in North America. For this there's a lot of reading you can do, but generally the recommendations come down to Jang or Sander books. The current RHEL OS is release 7, and the certification follows that so you'll have to make sure you're using up to date information for reasons of release specific changes (systemd as an example).
Additionally you'll want to make use of Administration guides and the official documentation. This will help you learn to use and administrate systems, but if you're looking to understand things on a lower level there are wonderful books such as How Linux Works to really understand what's going on underneath and help tie things together a bit.
At some point after you're familiar with Linux and you've been using it for a while comfortably you'll want to start learning BASH. Having a good handle on the command line with help with picking up BASH as you use the same commands strung together along with logic structures, error checking, and whatnot to accomplish the tasks you're trying to do. At least some BASH is recommended due to the power of it, and how all distros have a version of the bash shell so provided your script is built portable enough you'll be able to script tasks across systems.
This wiki links to a lot of valuable material, you'll want to go through it in conjunction with a guide such as this. As usual solving problems is a great way to learn, so if you give yourself a project to script and figure it out along the way is great.
Best of luck, this'll keep you busy for a while
Michael Jang is my go to recommendation. I have not (yet) seen the RHEL 7 edition.
Red Hat - Changes Between RHEL 6 and 7
Red Hat - Cheatsheet I actually really dig that pdf!
And if any of you are going to pursue certs on RHEL 7 - get a study guide. I can pretty much guarantee there are a few seemingly trivial differences that would likely make you fail the exam - and, of course, I can't go in to any detail ;-)
This book is pretty much a RHEL bible:
http://www.amazon.com/RHCSA-Linux-Certification-Study-Seventh/dp/0071841962
Great resource.
The exams give you some of the foundation blocks for a lot of the more advanced stuff. I think they are worth it.
Michael Jang
here
As you can imagine everyone's extremely circumspect about how to study for the test due to the NDAs: advice about what to study can be viewed as tantamount to saying "X, Y, Z is on the test."
Since you have RH 7.2 coming in your shop (congrats!) the best advice comes RedHat themselves: RHCE exam candidates should consult the RHCSA exam objectives and be capable of RHCSA-level tasks, as some of these skills may be required in order to meet RHCE exam objectives.
Having said that Jang's guides get pretty good reviews (Amazon.com). They're comprehensive although as always with a book this size there are inevitably errata. I've never used them but my several of my employees have and liked (CertDepot). Since you have this much time between now and the exam I'd dig deep into the (exam objectives) and make sure you can do those in your sleep.
Exam objectives aside all the shiny new stuff in 7.2 like systemd, networking and selinux are where you'll probably find the biggest gaps in your knowledge as 7.2 rolls out in your site. As a fellow old-schooler I just work under the assumption I'm going to get paged out of bed at 3 AM, I'll be shivering in the datacenter standing at the console of a downed production system and my cellphone can't get a signal, so all I have is what I remember and if I'm lucky the man pages.
Or if that seems unrealistic pretend you're going for a job interview at RedHat and that you must be able to describe commands and procedures to accomplish your job without referring to any external sites like Google or stack overflow.
I used Linuxacademy (the labs were great),
this book (mainly for review):
RHCSA/RHCE Red Hat Linux Certification Study Guide, Seventh Edition (Exams EX200 & EX300) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0071841962/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_APKGAb828V3VF
And this video series right before the test to get the feel for it:
http://www.sandervanvugt.com/course/red-hat-certified-system-administrator-exam-prep-video-workshop-download/
All that plus labbing and I was able to knock it out. Good luck!
You sound motivated! First off you definitely won't stay at the same company. You certainly don't "need" to go to college. Get yourself a book for red hat certification, or whatever you think you might be interested in, like this https://www.amazon.com/RHCSA-Linux-Certification-Study-Seventh/dp/0071841962
And then get to reading and implement everything in the book on a computer at home in your free time. You can easily setup a CentOS VM(google!) to practice everything in the book. By the time you're done you'll have a a decent concept of how everything in the book works. Then do the same for Microsoft if you so wish, MCSA book+practice. Cannot stress enough that you have to actually make the thing work on a real server(s) or it won't stick with you and it won't make a whole lot of sense. It's time consuming, but it's still going to be way faster(and cheaper) than a college course and the struggle of figuring out things yourself will make you remember it.
As far as attracting employers, well, someone's gonna have to take a chance on you. If there's internal positions you can apply to that would be good, you aren't an unknown entity and if you ramp up your knowledge on the tech it will be obvious to those who are in a position to give you a chance. If you go internal, you won't get a raise worth a crap, you're gonna have to change companies, but by then you'll have some real experience under your belt and can command a higher salary. If you actually go and take the tests and get the certifications, you have a better chance of getting hired somewhere else in a junior position. What I like to ask in interviews is "how much opportunity will I have to work with X technology?" If it's a straight taking calls day in day out with no interfacing with the engineering groups then pass, but if it's a closer knit type of deal where you're just one cube over from the guy deploying production servers, jump on it!
I worked in IT from the age of 18 (well, 14, if you count the freelance PC building work I did from 14-18) to 30, at which point I decided to re-skill and move into another career.
My advice about uni would be: unless you're planning on becoming a programmer, and maybe not even then, don't do it. Seriously.
IT is a lot like a traditional trade in that the most efficient way to learn best practice is to actually experience it on the job. Almost everything they will teach you in uni will be obsolete by the time you finish, or it won't be industry best practice.
I got my foot in the door at a company at 18, while my mates went to uni. By age 20 the company I worked for sent me over to the UK for 3 months to work in their new subsidiary as a senior technical advisor. Meanwhile, my mates hadn't even finished their degrees yet. When they did finally finish, they were taking help desk type jobs, while I was being employed as a systems engineer. And it's not because I was fucking brilliant or anything like that -- there's much more skilled individuals out there than me -- it was because I had 4+ years work experience over them by that point.
If you really do want to study, I would advise finding the industry standard certifications for your chosen area of interest, and doing them instead. For example, if you want to do networking, study for the CCNA exam, then go sit for it. With a CCNA you will get your foot in the door just about anywhere and it's much cheaper than a uni degree. You can find some study materials and exam guides at the following sites:
allITeBooks.com
Udemy / Udacity / EdX
Google 'moocs list reddit' for lists of even more free and paid online courses
I'd also advise you to get some sort of Linux cert. To do that you can get this book:
https://www.amazon.com/RHCSA-Linux-Certification-Study-Seventh/dp/0071841962/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1523303112&sr=8-1&keywords=jang+linux
Do all of the exercises, labs, and so forth, then go through each portion of each test on https://www.certdepot.net/.
Finally, understand that in order to succeed in this industry, you are going to have to do a lot of self-learning. That means creating a lab at home and fiddling with different equipment/products. If you don't have that sort of natural curiosity and love of learning, then I would suggest you find another career. IT is a field that is constantly changing and in order to stay on the cutting edge, you must do some learning outside of your job.
I hope this has been of some use to you.
RHCSA/RHCE Red Hat Linux Certification Study Guide, Seventh Edition (Exams EX200 & EX300) (Certification & Career - OMG) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0071841962/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_.qoQzbMPYYEZT
Red Hat RHCSA/RHCE 7 Cert Guide: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (EX200 and EX300) (Certification Guide) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0789754053/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_VsoQzbCCZTJ17
And lots of practice
Training, and learning nix. Alrighty.
So, first thing's first, check out DCCCD and Collin College for some good classes. I've taken the shell scripting and intro nix classes at Richland and they were helpful. I'd already been a sysadmin for a year or two and learned a few tips and tricks from instructors who'd been there a few times already.
LPI - Linux Professionl Institue - lpi.org - Check out the essentials and LPIC I. A bit deeper than Linux+ (more on this in a minute), I hear, and a bit more respected in the circles I run in.
CompTIA - Linux+ - Because of course CompTIA is going to offer a moneygrab...err...entry level certification on Linux. It's basically, I understand, an LPI Linux Essentials with CompTIA's logo. Is that a bad thing? No, not really if you're looking to get your feet wet.
And if you're so inclined, I'm a big fan of Michael Jang's books (i.e. http://smile.amazon.com/RHCSA-Linux-Certification-Seventh-Edition/dp/0071841962/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=0714AZZ2G0DT3926CJTS ). Practical, no-nonsense, and it will take you from little to no experience, to ready for your RHCSA/RHCE session in a couple of months, if you're willing to put in the time. Two of my cow-orkers and I all used Jang as our primary reference followed by an RHCE bootcamp and got our RHCSA and RHCEs. And, I'm about to use my Amazon Smile account (you're using Smile, and benefitting TheLab, right? Ask me how if you're not!) to pre-order the RHEL7 update that's going to drop soon.
Hope this helps, feel free to get in touch or grab me at a meeting if you have other questions.
-I5
No, I'm not Init6.
First, read our Wiki. It is very thorough and answers a lot of these common questions such as
day to day? The Practice of System and Network Administration
And the topical reference books listed below.
Books to help in shaping a sysadmin? The above &:
The Phoenix Project
Time Management for System Administrators
Topical Books I see mentioned often and have been very helpful to me:
Powershell in a month of lunches
Learn Python the hard way
Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook
Windows Server 2016: Inside Out
Group Policy
AbsoluteBSD
FreeBSD mastery:ZFS
CCNA
RHCSA/RHCE
Pro Puppet
SSH Mastery
On my docket:
FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS
Michael W. Lucas and Thomas Limoncelli are very good sysadmin writers, you can't go wrong with a topic they have chosen to write about.
Most of the *nix stuff assumes a baseline knowledge of how to use a unix-based system. I learned as I went but did pick up an old copy of Unix Visual Quickstart Guide not too long ago at a used books sale, which seems like a good starting place for someone overwhelmed with sitting at a terminal and being productive.
I notice I don't have any Virtualization books, perhaps someone else can fill in good books. Most of my knowledge regarding virtualization and network storage has been a mix of official docs, video training, and poking at it. Seems innate but it isn't.
Coming from a seasoned (5year+) sysadmin with strong network knowledge, please don't expect a $105k salary within 2 years. Not being an ass, just being realistic (I am in Sydney, Australia on a roster of 40hours/week which usually does exceed 40hrs/w, but less than 50hrs/w. The salaries are slightly higher due to the cost of living here being stupid).
I work with CentOS on a day to day basis, and have been using OpenStack for well over a year now. I originally "learned the ropes" by doing the RedHat training and Certification for OpenStack on IceHouse.
Since then, I now use OpenStack with Kolla backed with Docker (containerised OpenStack). For those wondering what Kolla is, it uses Ansible playbooks with Jinja2 templates along with Docker.
Just a bit of background knowledge from my perspective.. Our implementation started with 6 utility style servers (ie. nova, neutron, glance, cinder, ceilometer nodes with redundancy), and 3 Ceph + nova-compute "beefy" nodes.
It's very specific to our company, thus requiring custom modifications based upon sable release of the current non-development release of OpenStack ("Kilo"). It's not recommend doing this as you are venturing away from standard, this was also highlighted by several speakers at the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo last year.
Being attracted to OpenSource has it's pro's and con's. You as a person, think it's great. But as a company, it's generally harder to get across the line due to the following (see this as an example):
The list can go on. :)
Anyway, I can safely say that you need strong Linux and Networking skills to understand a lot of the concepts that OpenStack has (As an example, have you heard of Network namespaces before? Heard of VXLAN? Heard of OpenvSwitch? Do you know what tcpdump or tshark is? Heard of LACP?).
I very much agree with a lot of the other comments in regarding to focusing on your Linux skills before even attempting to tackle OpenStack.
I would say an ideal method to build up your skills is to go through the support channels and work your way up.
You gain very valuable knowledge from the perspective of "feeling the pain of the customer" in the scenario of an outage. It'll help you one day to put away the cowboy hat, and double check your work or write an additional if statement in a bash script. :)
Passion should give you drive. You don't attempt to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro without knowing how to walk up a hill first. 5 years+ in the job, and I still study new things (heck, even old things to sharpen the skills - waiting on this to arrive: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0071841962 ).
Sorry for the wall of text, I just hope it helps. Feel free to contact me if you wanted some direction~
I would highly recommend Michael Jang's book over Ghori's book. I bought Ghori's book because Jang's keep getting delayed, but I found it a dry and hard read.
https://www.amazon.com/RHCSA-Linux-Certification-Seventh-Edition/dp/0071841962/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=0MN513EW7QF9H09TJWSW
It might be worth it for you to pick up a good study guide for the new material to give you a better idea of what has and has not changed. I have a copy of this one, it's very well laid out and covers a lot of ground.
If you have a book to prepare for RHCSA/RHCE such as this one, you could read through that before your next try at Linux+. Maybe some things you learn from that book will increase your ability to get the right answers on the Linux+ exams.
I recommend you get Michael Jang's study guide and then setup a lab and practice, practice, practice.
At the risk of a self-plug, I'll offer up ELLIS (Enterprise Linux Lab Installer Script) for setting up your lab. It will give you all the infrastructure needed to practice for the exam on a single lab machine.
Linux, I assume?
Studying for the RHCSA is a pretty good way to learn the basics of *nix administration. This book could be helpful.
You could also read through this PDF to get a handle on the fundamentals before branching out to deeper stuff.
Cisco has a nice guide for networking basics here.
SysAdmin work is a fairly broad field, so I couldn't really think of any catch-all guides to cover most of what you'd potentially need to know. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a breadth of nice beginning tutorials like programming does. So, you're more than likely going to lean heavily on reading, hands-on experience, and your Google-fu to fill in the blanks. It may seem overwhelming at first but once you get the core concepts down, things start to snap into place. Trial-by-fire tends to be the ultimate learning method that most of us had to go through in order to really learn any of it.
Some useful subs:
When I studied for the RHCSA, I found that Sander Van Vugt came highly recommended. Best of all? $Free (i.e. get the free trial and go for it)
https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/red-hat-certified/9780134723990/
I also got the Ashgar Ghori book because the Michael Jang one wasn't out yet.
Jang's RHEL6 books were highly regarded, so I would expect his RHEL7 stuff to be held in similar esteem. Ghori's book seemed perfectly capable, though.
I used one called RHCSA/RHCE Redhat Linux Certification Study Guide, 7th Edition.
It's this one: https://www.amazon.com/RHCSA-Linux-Certification-Study-Seventh/dp/0071841962
I believe they removed the Linus System Administration Essentials course. The Linux Foundation Edx page only show these two courses.
I think the industry standard is still RHCSA/RHCSE which might be cheaper than the Linux Foundation Course. Going for RHCSA is $400 USD for the exam, and you can probably attain the training material for about 60-70 USD.
I think going for RHCSA would better suit anyone who might want to pursue a career in Linux Admin work because the name would get picked up by HR filters or listings. Whereas the LS cert is still new and not really recognized by many companies.
This book, and the practice companion is about $30 USD each.
Or has there been a shift where Linux Foundation certs aremore valued over RedHat certs?
The Linux Documentation Project is a great free resource:
http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/
A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming (4th Edition)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0134774604/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_bh7QAb518JBC8
The first two are for learning Bash; this is an awesome resource for learning how to administer RHEL/CentOS7:
RHCSA/RHCE Red Hat Linux Certification Study Guide, Seventh Edition (Exams EX200 & EX300)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0071841962/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_wj7QAbX8M0DG5
I've been using this book. If you join the rhel channel here in reddit, you will see a lot of people recommend it. RHCSA/RHCE Red Hat Linux Certification Study Guide, Seventh Edition (Exams EX200 & EX300) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0071841962/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_sLY2Bb0ZTNBMM
Good luck.
Trying to address all your questions.
For more in-depth, study like you're planning on taking the RHCSA/RHCE exam. The objectives (RHCSA/RHCE) do a good job of covering the fundamentals. The book by Michael Jang is an excellent resource for this.
If you want a "fuck you, eat linux" type approach, I'd recommend doing a Gentoo or Arch install. This won't teach you everything, but you will learn about some of the lower level parts of the OS that make it tick. I'd still recommend this (especially the Gentoo install) after you get the fundamentals down.
There are definitely some distros that are more "enterprise" than others. Generally I see mostly these deployed for enterprise use:
Other distros like Mint, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch, etc. are only really used for desktops unless you really hate yourself or your admins. I have seen some Gentoo or Arch servers out in the wild before that customers have deployed.. but it's rare. Generally the big three (RHEL/CentOS, Ubuntu and Debian) are what are in demand skill-wise. There are some specialized distros used in enterprise that aren't as common (Scientific Linux, CoreOS, etc).
CentOS is essentially RHEL with all the proprietary bits ripped out (some other small differences). I was able to study for my RHCE with CentOS without issue, they're that similar. You will run into trouble if you start going for some of the more specialized RHEL certs using CentOS.
I hope this helps!
buy this book, practice everything on centos, and you should be fine
I got my RHCE certs pretty easily with Michael Jang's excellent book.
What Michael Jang book are you guys referring to? Is it this one?
https://www.amazon.com/RHCSA-Linux-Certification-Study-Seventh/dp/0071841962/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1523426860&sr=8-1&keywords=michael+jang+rhcsa
I also don't really enjoy coding. I got into the industry by studying for (and not quite passing) the Red Hat Certified Systems Administrator exam. Took me a year on my own to get through this prep book cover to cover (note that the current version for the current test is here, though.) Of note, I only had about a year's worth of linux experience when I started studying. At that point, I had: stood up a basic LAMP stack, implemented Apache and Postfix/Courier/Roundcube. At the time I was working as a (not so successful) photographer, and my goal at that time was to create a web hosting company that would let models host their website portfolios and send/receive IMAP email through their own domains. A month after I got the whole platform running, a little site came along called https://www.modelmayhem.com/ . Oops. I'm still super glad I did; working as an infrastructure engineer is the most rewarding job I've ever had.
Anyway, I'm just saying that you don't have to be a programming guru, but you'd do well to at least master bash, and become intermediate in one scripting language (I usually recommend python.)
I've read this same author's on version 6, and I'm going through version 7 now.
The only way to know is to try the test, or practice tests/questions. This book has some of each for RHCE and RHCSA: https://www.amazon.com/RHCSA-Linux-Certification-Study-Seventh/dp/0071841962
Exam is administered largely one of two ways:
You only get a single try. If you fail, you have to pay $400 again.
Book One
https://www.amazon.com/Practice-System-Network-Administration-Enterprise/dp/0321919165
You won't need book two until you start looking at cloud based deployments or have a need for scalability.
There are a number of books for RHCSA I personally found Michael Jang's to be more digestible but that is more of a personal preference. I'd see if a local B&N has either and see which looks better if its an option. Also be aware that if you do intend to go for the cert; Redhat will be upgrading their exam to use the newer version of the Redhat distro which would make some of the material less relevant.
https://www.amazon.com/RHCSA-Linux-Certification-Study-Seventh/dp/0071841962/