RHCE books

Khannie

So I've started the RHCT / RHCE certification. I'm gonna do the RHCT first then maybe focus on the RHCE for RHEL6 if it's out at that stage. I bought two books - the company was paying and it was a small investment on their part. I wanted the best chance of success and both books got good reviews. Now I can only carry one book with me at a time. They're heavy and I have limited room in my bag after all my other gear fills it up. I'll be spending about 4 hours a week reading on the train and 4 hours a week in front of a computer / doing practical stuff.

The two books I got are:

RHCE Red Hat Certified Engineer Linux Study Guide

and

Red Hat® Certified Technician & Engineer (RHCT and RHCE) Training Guide and Administrator's Reference

The first one gets some good and some moderate reviews, but a lot of them. The 2nd one gets very good reviews but only a small number of them.

So the first one arrived and I started reading it. First impressions: Easy to read. Good focus on the exam.

The 2nd one arrived the next day. Since it had been getting good reviews I decided I'd give it a bash given the good reviews. First impressions: A bit concerned. The guy isn't RHCE certified (he is RHCT). There were also several very basic grammatical errors in the first chapter. I mean really basic stuff which led me to believe that it wasn't proof read at all.

Anyway, has anyone read the 2nd one the whole way through and used it to pass RHCT or RHCE?

pickarooney

Tell them to buy you an iPad so you can carry both books around

Sorry, can't help on the book front.

BopNiblets

I have the 2nd one but haven't finished it yet, and it's slow going for me, seems good though, but I can't compare it to anything else really, sorry.

Khannie

Ah that's good enough. To be honest, the fact that he wasn't RHCE certified was more than a bit worrying for me.

ntlbell

I used the first one.

If you don't use RH all day every day in a production environment, unless you spend a huge amount of spare time hands on you're going to struggle.

The exam is very challenging get as much time as you can hands on.

(Just re-read your post, I'm referring to RHCE)

Khannie

ntlbell wrote: »

If you don't use RH all day every day in a production environment, unless you spend a huge amount of spare time hands on you're going to struggle.

The exam is very challenging get as much time as you can hands on.

(Just re-read your post, I'm referring to RHCE)

That's grand. The end goal is the RHCE. RHCT is just easier to focus on in the shorter term (I expect it to be relatively handy for me....words may be eaten). I'll be using RHEL in work a reasonable amount. Would you think that shifting my work desktop box to CentOs would help out a good bit when I start on the road to RHCE?

Naikon

Khannie wrote: »

That's grand. The end goal is the RHCE. RHCT is just easier to focus on in the shorter term (I expect it to be relatively handy for me....words may be eaten). I'll be using RHEL in work a reasonable amount. Would you think that shifting my work desktop box to CentOs would help out a good bit when I start on the road to RHCE?

I am running CentOS 5.4 at the moment. It's well worth installing because it's 100% binary compatible
with the RedHat distro. Infact, any RedHat derived distro such as Fedora Core such do the trick just fine.

CentOS = RedHat

ntlbell

Khannie wrote: »

That's grand. The end goal is the RHCE. RHCT is just easier to focus on in the shorter term (I expect it to be relatively handy for me....words may be eaten). I'll be using RHEL in work a reasonable amount. Would you think that shifting my work desktop box to CentOs would help out a good bit when I start on the road to RHCE?

It won't do you any harm CentOS is bsically RH without the logo's etc

If you work with any linux admins, I would setup a decent VM enviorment and have the admins make some interesting changes so you can practice troubleshooting and to be able to make a foobar'd image bootable etc

As someone else pointed out, if you can't get the machine to a bootable state in the exam you're not going to be able to carry out the rest of the tasks

Khannie

Hmmmm. I was very much looking forward to upgrading this machine to ubuntu 10.04 LTS when it arrives (currently 8.04 LTS) but I suppose I could just dual boot until after the exam. Thanks.

Khannie

Jaysus. Centos 5.4 is even using even older gear than Ubuntu 8.04.

FruitLover

Fedora's more suitable for a desktop OS IMO. I'd keep CentOS for the servers.

Khannie

Yeah, I'm about 30 seconds ahead of you. Downloading the fedora 12 cd now. I think that should red-hat-ise me enough for the exam. I'll use a VM for the RHEL specific stuff (not that I think there's much / any compared to fedora). It'll allow me to deliberately break stuff then fix it anyway.

Naikon

Khannie wrote: »

Yeah, I'm about 30 seconds ahead of you. Downloading the fedora 12 cd now. I think that should red-hat-ise me enough for the exam. I'll use a VM for the RHEL specific stuff (not that I think there's much / any compared to fedora). It'll allow me to deliberately break stuff then fix it anyway.

FruitLover is right, the CentOS distro isn't the best for desktops. It's a bit like Debian stable. I have Fedora on my main machine, and CentOS on the server. Really good way of getting to know the RHCE/RHCT stuff.
Not easy at all, but well worth the effort. @Khannie, the mere fact you have been using Gentoo for so long means you won't have too much trouble getting adjusted;) I remember getting Gentoo installed the first time.
Bit of a pain, but it's a super way to learn. Only thing that didn't keep me was the minimal number of binary packages. Compiling everything from source gets a little old after a while. Still a really good distro though.