RHCSA and RHCSE study material

It's not really possible to say whether you could learn enough to pass the RHCSA in that time as it depends a lot on you, how much you can learn and how much you can understand the concepts and how to interpret a fairly worded task description under exam conditions. I would note that if you are mainly using RHEL6 then you need to learn for the exam on RHEL 7 and you have to be very careful on which version of RHEL 7 you learn on. When I did the exams last year they were still using RHEL 7.0 for the exams and that meant you were had to be careful as some things (particularly in the RHCE) had changed in subsequent RHEL 7.x releases.

I remember when i took my RHEL 6 RHCSA I did the one week revision course (since restructured for the worse) with both exams on the Friday. The course I was on covered both the RHCSA and RHCE but there was a course running at the same time which was the RHCSA only. Sitting in the break room at lunch time and hearing the people coming out of RHCSA only course's exam you could tell that a lot of them just were not ready and were taking it far, far to early. From what they were saying I would say at least 70% had definitely failed. Even in my RHEL 7 RHCE last year there were almost as many people in the exams resitting than there was taking it for the first time (and from some of the under breath muttering it wasn't going well for them).

To be ready you should be able to do most of the RHCSA syllabus without thinking to hard about it. As I said before things like normal LVM tasks should be a no brainer as should installing packages (including creating a repo file in order to be able to do so). The number of things to lean is quite high but it is normally clear from the syllabus what is needed, just remember it must survive a reboot and the system in general must still reboot! RHCE is more complicated and knowing shortcuts to find out on the fly how to do something can override just remembering everything off the top of your head, (e.g. ISCSI which was the bane of my colleague's revision), i.e. I can remember all about X which may eat up all my revision time or I can remember that if I look at example A in this man page and example B in this man page it gives me all the information I need to set that up.

I would note that certdepot.net also has some useful stuff on it.
 
I'm gonna read the Sanders text book and watch the two videos on Linux Academy as a starting point.

One thing I was thinking about today. How close are we to RHEL 8?

There isn't danger in he next 6 -9 months of Red Hat suddenly changing the exams to RHEL 8 and basically nullifying all these studying I'm planing.

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Here's the other thing. I'm planning to give my self up to three years in current job before I start looking for something new. Primarily for a pay rise.

My plan originally was to cover some python as well as the Linux as a lot of jobs I see advertised the requirements say should also know at least one programming language.

If I go for the RHCSA and RHCE with the plan to actually sit the exams and pass them then I think I might be very busy over the next 1.4 years I have left before I reach year 3 in current job.

If on the other hand, I cover the material in the RHCSA and RHCE and not get too hung up on passing the exams this would then free up time to get some python under my belt as well.

At interview stage you do get a technical exam anyway so having passed the RH exams although would be wonderful I can still demonstrate my Linux ability with out certification at interview stage.

What do you think?

Worth spending my time to get the Red Hat certs or being a bit more rounded and studying some python as well? (Also need to improve my bash scripting too)
 
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1.5 years you should be able to do both. If it takes you slightly longer ... then what's the problem spending 3.5years in the job rather than 3years?

RHEL 8, personally I don't see it coming out before next summer (general consensus amongst the senior people I deal with) ... but I'll probably see our global partner manager next month so will trying to get some hints out of him then.

And it can take quite some time for the training and exams to be updated for the new release (and to be working properly).
 
FYI last black Friday linuxacademy were doing 1 yr subs for £85 through stack social. Udemy was doing all courses for $10. Lots of stuff like that, just wait until then and purchase all at once.
 
Also it should be noted that there are Live Lessons on Safari, Sander did a RHCE exam prep course earlier on - virtual classroom, asking him questions etc.

So there's quite a few reasons to go with SBO.
 
I'm highly tempted to do these exams. I might sign up for Safari Books Online and see how I get on. $39 a month doesn't seem too bad, and I can always cancel if I don't get much value out of it.
 
Hi, I am also using Linux Academy. I think that they have very good content for any course. Although, I always use some book aside. But, what people don't realize about total length of the Linux Academy courses is that they calculate all exercises, labs, quizzes... in total length of the course. So if you add only video lengths of RHCSA for ex., it is around 10 hours in time. Same for any other course.
Any news about your exams?
 
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Recertified last year on RHCSA with RHEL 7 and more recently completed RHCE. For these I used the Van Vugt book, Safari video subscription (for the Sander Van Vugt content) and also used some Linux Academy. All of these were a great help for practising the objectives, however I was also lucky enough that my employer paid for me to go on the Systems Administration III course. The course was brilliant, time away from work and family whilst on the course allowed me to really focus on the course content and get the RHCE.
 
Interesting, I think that the actual Red Hat courses do vary enormously depending on who you get as a lecturer. When I did my RHEL7 RHCE me, and my colleague, did the SysAdmin III course variant where you do both the RHCSA and RHCE exams on the last day. Frankly we found the course to be absolutely abysmal but a lot of that seemed to be due to the lecturer who seemed to know nothing beyond the course notes, and even then was unable to provide real assistance if one of the labs had an issue. We learnt significantly more in the evening going through stuff back at the hotel with a VPN connection back through to our labs. Even with a substantial Red Hat Partner discount the course was very much a waste of money.

Of course back when I did my RHEL6 RHCE I went on the proper revision course they used to run and that was a very good preparation for that exam but unfortunately they changed the equivalent course for RHEL7.
 
One thing we didn't mention in this thread is getting a Red Hat Developer account. It's free, let's you access a selection of their software including RHEL and gives you access to their knowledgebase which is very useful.

Not really needed it up to now as my employer is a premier partner, so I have various full accounts and NFR licenses, but I'm leaving them next month and I doubt the company I'm going to will have the same level of access.
 
I would note (as finding things on there isn't great) that for anyone whose company is a Red Hat Partner RHEL 8 training has started hitting the OPEN system at the moment with a short course on the new YUM changes and a longer, video, course on RHEL 8 for experienced admins.
 
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