linux

This book says it's a study guide for the Linux+ certification. Well, yes and no. It does explain the concepts of Linux, it does give a brief description of the test and has a CD that contains two sample tests. However, that's where the study guide ends. It's really a beginner's guide to Linux as opposed to a study guide.

This book is very verbose in that it uses a lots of paragraphs as opposed to tables, lists, and definition. It's a good thorough read, but a terrible, terrible reference book. Designed for the absolute beginner, it's not for people who played with Linux and are trying to get certified. The first half of the book is extremely basic where it takes about 10 minutes of reading for anything particular concept to become apparent. The latter half is more advanced and informative, but without simple tables and references, much of the information is lost in the needless rambling.

The worst parts are the review sections. The summaries at the end of the chapter are really lacking. So while concepts are explained well, the details (e.g. where are the system logs, how to alter the init level scripts) are hidden within chapters.

The practice tests are good, but the difficulty between the end of chapter tests and the practice tests are huge.

A study guide needs to be full of facts, easily searchable, concise, and contain a lot of information. This book only fulfills the latter requirement.

There's something ironic about a linux book that's not compatible with linux. When you want to learn windows, you use windows; when you want to learn linux, apparently, you also use windows, because they never thought that anyone would use anything else.

It says on the back of the book, "Test your knowledge with advanced testing software that runs on Linux and Windows." In theory it can run under linux, in practice it does not. They didn't test it.

Unlike windows, files under linux are case-sensitive, and the html files on the CD are expecting all the wrong names. They aren't even consistent in what case they expect the files on the CD to be, sometimes uppercase, sometimes mixed case, while nearly everything on the cd is pure lowercase. To put it clearly, it's dead-link city. The only way use the testing software(in the form of Shockwave files) under linux is to copy the CD to your hard drive and fix all the HTML capitalization mistakes.

The ebook contained on the CD is also not usable under linux, but this is not the fault of anyone at Sybex. Adobe is presumably working on it.

The content of the book itself is otherwise quite useful, albeit somewhat redhat-centric.

I reviewed the first edition of this book and found a few shortcomings, all of which have been fixed in this edition. The prior edition did not cover some hardware items that I saw on the exam; this edition includes it. The prior edition had installation screen shots from the Mandrake distribution, but Redhat is a far more common distribution in the business environment. This edition uses screenshots from RedHat Fedora. The index in the prior edition was not as thorough as I would have liked. This edition includes the items I looked for but was unable to find in the prior one. Even with the shortcomings in the prior version it was still the best certification study
guide that I had reviewed. This edition is an improvement on the best study guide available, making it the new champ.

One of the things I like best about Sybex certification books is that they are one of the few publishers who provide both the information needed to pass the exam and the information needed to actually work in the real world. All the most common networking and administrative tasks, troubleshooting, adding packages, adding hardware, and installation are covered in detail including installation methods and problems, security, file services, and troubleshooting. The author does an excellent job of walking the reader through all the various processes step by step and explaining each item in detail.

Each chapter ends with a chapter summary, a section on exam essentials that summarizes exam critical items, a summary of commands covered in the chapter, a key terms list, and review questions and answers. The book even includes a CD with a test engine, two exam preparation exams, and flashcards. I've taught Linux at the college level both for certification and for practical application purposes and this is the best book available for the new or only minimally experienced Linux user who is planning to take the certification exam. The "Linux+ Study Guide, Second Edition" is the best exam preparation study guide I have seen on the market to date and a highly recommended read for anyone seeking certification.