Product: RHCSA/RHCE Red Hat Linux Certification Study Guide

First of all, this book is meant to help you study for two different exams. This means that the topic are covered in a bit of a strange order. First, the RHCSA is covered. This is the Red Hat entry level exam. Unless you are a long time sysadmin, you can expect to learn quite a bit from this part of the book, even if you have been running Linux as a normal user for years (as I have). The second part is more focused, because the RHCE exam looks in more detail at various services and securing them. As a result of the author’s decision to organize this way (which is helpful if you only want to study for one exam at a time and not dive in to the deep end), the book seems rather disjointed, You will end up studying topics like SELinux in one chapter, going totally away from it, and coming back to it a few chapters later. This makes it a substandard reference book, but as that isn’t what it was meant for, I count the organization as a plus. It is more of a get your feet wet first, then dive in approach.

In terms of helping you study for the exam, some useful features include:
* Instructions for creating virtual machines to be used in the lab exercises.
* Bullet points summarizing each chapter.
* Exercises and (hands-on) labs for each chapter.
* As mentioned above, organization by test, so that you needn’t worry about one if studying for the other.

Lastly, as with any topic you want to excel at, the key is to practice as much as you possibly can. To that end, you will want a machine with lots of disk space and perhaps a decent amount of rap which supports hardware virtualization, and preferably is running 64-bit Linux (which KVM on Red Hat seems to require). If you can’t do this though, you probably want to set up dual booting to a few copies of Linux so that if you mess one up, you will still be able to use your machine. This won’t be quite as satisfactory though, because messing up with fdisk or parted will still put you in a world of hurt (voice of experience here!), but with a VM, you will only mess up the VM and lose the time it takes to kickstart a new one. As far as the version of Linux, you will want to practice on either the official Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or one of the equivalent, freely available clones like CentOS (my choice) or Scientific Linux. If you try to use recent versions of Fedora, you will be a bit too cutting edge. I have found that it swaps out a lot of things (iptables, init, etc.) that RHEL is based on. Non-Red Hat versions are going to be quite a bit different too, and should probably be skipped, though a lot will still be similar.

It is worth mentioning that the Kindle edition seems to be some sort of PDF-like format which will not reflow to your screen. I can see the reason for doing this, but it would be nice if it was in standard Kindle format.

P.S. I should offer the disclaimer that I haven’t yet taken either exam, so I can’t sally how the book compares to the real thing, but even without passing the exam, this book has helped me greatly in my day-to-day dealings with LInux.
Rating: 5
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