Red Hat Certification

[Ed Wilts]

On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 03:37:31PM -0500, Jason Brown wrote:
> How much RH experience did the people who passed have before studying and
> passing the exams.  The reason why I ask is because I was thinking of taking
> all of the courses but I would be paying for them out of pocket and really
> don't want to spend the thousands of dollars to do so.

I've been using Linux since about RHL 5.2 although I ran Caldera for a
while and also Mandrake for a while.  I wouldn't say I had extensive
experience but I spent a lot of time on mailing lists helping people and
picking up knowlede that way.

The training courses are excellent but it's your own money so you have
to be a bit frugal.

You might be better off spending the dollars on a dedicated system you
can learn on and then spend a lot of evenings going through the doc set
and exam requirements learning.  Help people on the mailing lists,
looking up answers for them when you don't know the answer.

If you can afford to take one class, take the Rapid Track course - it's
4 intense days that helps fill in the holes from stuff you might not
have spent a lot of time on, and then the 5th day of the week is the
exam.  Plan on studying the evening of that week too and reward yourself
for the following weekend.

The only course I took was the Rapid Track one.  I aced the exam.
Remember that the exam is purely goal-based - it doesn't matter how you
get things done, as long as you get the right answer in the end (and
obviously within the allotted time).  There are many ways to get a job
done and there really is no one right answer.  You can accomplish some
of the same things with tcp_wrappers or ipchains and you can chose which
one solves the exam requirements so that may really help you if you
have, say, more experience with ipchains than tcp_wrappers or sendmail
vs postfix. 

        .../Ed

-- 
Ed Wilts, RHCE
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program