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Seeking Hands-on Training Programs?
thekernel32 asks: "Recently the topic of getting people trained in the Linux/UNIX environment has troubled me. Where are people going for this stuff? I recall taking an Microsoft Networking Essentials class that I dropped out of. The reason why I dropped the Microsoft class was because we were being taught about the existence of Routers, File Servers and other networking topics, but we never saw or [worked with] any of them. I really feel that it would have been more useful to get hands on experience with daemons and real hardware, rather than just being told that they exist. What decent training programs out there have a hands on approach?"
Most of the instructors were using stock Motorola class stuff, some of which wasn't great, but if you have a good instructor that can make up for it.
The best instructor was James Lee from Onsight.com who had a bunch of custom Perl (beginning and advanced), CGI, TCL, and a few others, all of which were outstanding. These are the guys that wrote Hacking Linux Exposed and I recently got Open Source Web Development with LAMP that is just excellent, and really mirrors their training skills.
I don't know if they do classes outside of Motorola (their web page seems to indicate they do), but I'd highly recommend them.
In general, if you work at a big enough company, they probably have good internal training classes available, or can send you to classes that are good outside.
I'd be wary trying to pick one on your own, though. I had very bad luck with some "big names" like Learning Tree which seem to just cobble together classes quickly, and try to debug them with you as the guinea pigs at hundreds of dollars a pop.
This is not a sig.
Where are people going for this stuff?
A few hours with a LUG will do wonders. Yeah, people harp about 'certs' and 'proper training', but noone knows linux better than the people who love it and are willing to help others.
Well, with linux, you have three choices:
Hands on. Yeh.
Linux is free: download it, install it, disconnect it from the modem until you know what you're doing, and play with it. That's about as hands on as you can get.
Did I mention it's free? And that rabid OS zealots will be more than happy to help you install it if you act at all attracted to the Kool Aid they're pushing? And did I mention it's free?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I'm a curriculum developer for Apple's Technical Training and Certification department, and I also act as the backup sysadmin for our Reston, VA training center. All of our courses are hands-on using serious equipment, with an iBook laptop and a G4 tower at each student station, along with a G4 tower for the instructor and possibly also (depending on the class) an XServe rackmount, a Windows 2000 Server, and Solaris servers, all networked together.
The classes run three to five days, each day covering on average three chapters. Each chapter consists of an instructor presentation for about 30 minutes, followed by a student exercise that runs between an hour to two hours. As you can see from the time involved, our approach definitely emphasizes the hands-on aspects.
I can tell you as one of the people who both writes and teaches Apple's courses, most people will zone out if they have to listen to the instructor for more than 30 minutes. At the technical training level, I can't imagine sitting through a straight lecture class for a whole day without a hands-on piece, and really retaining very much of the content.
--Paul
Paul Suh
Curriculum Developer
Technical Training and Certification
Apple Computer
psuh at apple dot com
My company sent me to two Learning Tree classes which sounded great on paper, but were pretty lame . The instructors seemed to have walked in off the street and read the training paperwork, but didn't have any real world experience, so they couldn't help me with anything not in our handouts.
I also took a class from some other similar company (forget the name) and had a worse experience, so I guess Learning Tree isn't the bottom of the barrel.
I'd definately try to find a local LUG and pick brains of other geeks. You will learn one way to do it which is not guarenteed to be the best way, but it's a start. How you really learn is to have several LUGgers try to teach you the best way, and you get to learn a lot in their holy wars as they explain the pros and cons of their positions.
The reason why I dropped the Microsoft class was because we were being taught about the existence of Routers, File Servers and other networking topics
You know what - THAT's an advanced topics in Microsoft Networking Essential! I once received a call from an MCSE asking me why he couldn't see the domain controller and its neigbours in the Network Neighbourhood. I checked and told him that he's in the wrong domain and he insisted that he's in the right domain because he has typed the correct domain name in the 'NT domain' box something like that. I told him it's the TCP/IP domain we are talking about and the Netbios traffic couldn't passthru the routers. Then he, with pride and professional tone, told me that Netbios is on the top of any networking protocol and devices such that it SHOULD be transparent to Microsoft Network, and that I should look into the problem...
Things go downhill from there.
Global Knowledge has some pretty good training courses. I haven't taken any of the Unix/Linux courses, but their Cisco courses have bene informative.
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Their Unix/Linux catalog is here http://www.globalknowledge.com/training/category.
Rad Hat has some nice certification programs that seem to be versatile and respectable: RHCE
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
GuruLabs
-Derek
Community colleges often are trying to give you real world skills you can use today, and are a good bet if you have one with competant CS instructors. Don't take anything where it's more theory than practice though, such as at a real college where they want you to have tons of unnecessary (in the real world) prereqs first.
Snakes are people too.
You can do both. Sysadmins who code are usually more competent. Programmers who sysadmin often write more usable system administration programs.
At my uni there is a sysadmin course for the information systems studends taught in a special lab cut off from the rest of the network as that the students. Looks like a fun course but its not available to the CS guys which is a shame.
Does anybody else have this sort of course available to them as part of their degrees>
If you read a speed reading book, does it take you less time to read the second half?
When I was in junior high school, I still thought programming was fun. On my trusty Apple ][e I experimented with fractals and cellular autonoma, and wrote some pretty sophisticated Zork-style text adventure games. Then I got to college and took my first actual programming courses. There I discovered that in the real world I was going to be spending most of my time writing programs other people wanted.
After changing my major a few times, I eventually ended up back in the IT world, this time on the administration side of things. As another poster pointed out, the appeal of sysadmining is watching the whole system work. I get the same thrill out of controlling a remote server thousands of miles away, as I did running my model railroad as a kid.