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What Would You Recommend for IT Training?
ITPhantom wonders: "It is that time again and my supervisor has been coming around and asking what training and conferences I would like to attend in the upcoming year. I have recently been put in charge of the management and security of a few dozen machines in our department, and our internal network (simple as it may be). While most of the machines that I am responsible for are running Windows, there are a few Linux machines in the mix. I am fairly proficient with Windows, but have not had any real experience managing Linux machines, though I have been a casual user for about a year. With all of the options available, from online training to extensive boot camps and seminars, what would you recommend for training in the areas above?"
If you are around San Francisco bay area, then a training outfit that I very much recommend is LinuxCertified (http://www.linuxcertified.com). I attended a "bootcamp" style class (Linux system administration) there few months ago and it was by far the most helpful IT class that I have attended. I found the training to be very practical in nature. It was distro independent (although they used Fedora during the class itself). Also, I would recommend having a shelf full of oreilly books... :)
Great security info... plus a week and a half in florida in the winter. That's why I went, and want to go ;)
Just RTFM, it's the Linux Way®
I've been a general programmer for 10+ years. I didn't think I'd get much out of a CCNA class but I really enjoyed it. Many things that were hazy before (subnet masks, switches vs routers, etc) are now crystal clear.
I'm now using my new knowledge of the UDP protocol to do some cool broadcasting stuff in some of my client-server apps.
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
I don't know about the rest of the slashdotters, but from the experience i got from college i would get some books on the matter before attending any kind of training. I know this is not the quickest way out, but is the thorough way, and believe me sometimes in IT doing it right is much more important than doing it quickly.
There's so much good stuff available for free on the internet that i can't even point out where exactly you can start, that depends on what you want to learn first
But, anyhow, if budget is not a problem in your job, as it is in my, you could still benefit from some by-yourself studying before you face some formal training.
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
Have them send you to BlackHat. You might as well learn some cool stuff. In addition to the bookshelf full of O'Reilly books that another poster mentioned, I found Linux Network Servers 24/7 to be a helpful book. Although it was centered on RedHat it did a good job of focusing on the setup of all the typical components that you'd want to run on a Linux server in a networked environment.
...classes in Indian and Chinese. Pretty sure those skills will pay off big in the next 20 years or so.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
If you want the training to do your job better, then your company will get far more education for their money by investing in a few good books and giving you the time to read them. If you can't learn from a book, you've no business being in the industry IMO.
However learning from books doesn't look as good on a CV as training courses, so if you don't care about learning but do care about impressing the people who interview you next, then go for that.
DEFCON
A lot of admins in my company seem to like the Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) training (http://www.eccouncil.org/CEH.htm).
A job. Nothing makes you learn how to solve problems more than actually having toi solve them.
I would sign up for a subscription to the safari bookshelf service from o'reilly being able to search such a large library can be very valuable for things you have little experience with. I come from the dev. side so I dont know of many sys admin specific "classroom" type stuff, but I have always got alot out of SD Expo and the many break out session esp. the birds of a feather after hours "tech chat over beers" meetings (It hasnt been as good since y2k but still valuable).
I have gone for training at a few different places. I liked my the Learning Tree in Linux/Unix Security and Solaris (also some Windows) because their instructors were good and had a lot of real-world experience. The difference between RTFM and a classroom is that you can ask questions, and others in the class may even have questions of their own they want answered. Some of my instructors at LT were writing open-source packages you've heard of, others had run Unix security at government agencies you've heard of. Learning Tree has actually refunded money for classes that were insufficient when people complained they didn't get what they needed. They'll work to get you back.
Boot camps are different. They are for people who need to be certified quickly because their work requires it. The hours are longer, the class is geared more to passing the exams, and pressure is mcuh greater. Not everyone handles that kind of pressure. I've done boot camps for my MCSE (!) upgrades at Acrew, which is no more, and a CISSP at The Training Camp. My primary CISSP guy at TTC was awesome with a decade of large-bank systems security experience, but the trainee (who taught one chapter only -- physical security) read straight from the powerpoint slides.
The most important thing is the instructor and his or her experience. Talk to people and see what they've done. That's how I initially found Learning Tree. In my world, training is regular and you need to figure out where to spend your training time and money. (For me, coming up with a free four or five day period to be away from the office is harder than getting the money for it.)
One word of warning: although Learning Tree is accredited and offers college credit, when I applied to grad school they didn't accept the credits because I didn't get a letter grade. It wasn't a big deal but slowed me down one semester. I'm now one semester away from a master's in Information Systems. IS vs. Computer Science is a whole other debate. Grad school and training end up costing about the same per course: $2000-$2500. Grad school covers theory, training covers technique.
books are important.
however, two of the things most overlooked about classes are a) the ability of the instructor (hopefully) to help you build the picture that makes you understand something. books have a hard time doing that. b) let you see a different perspective from your classmates. the people around you have different way of looking at things that is very similar to why programmers sometimes find it helpfull to have other people look at their code for the sneaky bug.
eric
For IT in general, a class in interpersonal skills would be beneficial.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
A little German and Japanese would go far too...
Might as well get ready for when your bosses bosses boss goes to a lunchin and decides to outsource whole departments overseas.
I'm assuming you're more then capable in the desktop support arena. The above recommendations are things I've had to relearn over the past 10 years in managing a system that started with 50 and has since grown to 5500 nodes. The more adaptable you build your fledgling network today, the more you'll thank me down the line.
If you're half as beautiful naked, you'd be 4 times as beautiful with twice as many clothes on.
To be honest, asking your boss for a day or two to just sit down with some good books and tutorials, and work with new technologies firsthand... that's what works best for me, at least. A lot less expensive than travelling around the country, and you might just get better results.
Also check to see if there are any consultants in your area (like me, well probably not in your area) who offer training services custom-tailored to what you need.
Oh, and O'Reily's Safari Bookshelf is pretty nice.
I've attended training courses and spent a lot of money at Barnes & Noble, but I'm learning the most now that I'm in grad school. Graduate courses don't just give you specific information, or have you follow a manual to complete some hands-on training. (Or at least they shouldn't.) They should force you to research different topics in depth and, ideally, think about it. This is something you don't get from a 3-day training course. You can also get exposed to the theory behind the technology, so you can understand why it is used in some situations and not others, and can understand the trade-offs. There are always trade-offs.
I understand that you might not want to go back to school on a full-time basis, but there are a lot of real universities that offer real courses over the web, and they can lead to different certificates or graduate degree. For example, at Iowa State University, (Disclaimer: I am a Ph.D. student there), they have a good Engineering Distance Education program. Now, since you specificaly mentioned security responsibilities, there are 2 programs you might be interested in:
The Information Assurance Graduate Certificate link
Masters of Science in Information Assurance link
Courses are offered over the web, lectures are streamed live and are available for download, and you can get DVDs of the lectures mailed to you. All of the courses are designed with off-campus students in mind, including a policy that off-campus homeworks are due 1-week after on-campus students so any DVDs that are sent have time to arrive. Also, if you talk to the professors when work issues come up, arrangements can be made.
Another nice point about working with a university is access to equipment and software that wouldn't otherwise be available - sometimes for weeks at a time. For example, in my Forensics class we got to use EnCase and FTK for our projects. In the Information Warfare class, we got to perform a break-in lab on a fake company network - sort of like you would do in an Ethical Hacking class - but we got several weeks to look for vulnerabilities. In a 3-day course you may get to use their software and equipment, but there is no time in the schedule for you to play around with it. When the class lasts a few months, there are a lot of opportunities for you to use it, just to use it.
Yes, taking the actual courses, with the actual tests, homeworks and projects can be a real pain - both in time and effort, but can also provide opportunities to learn a lot more overall.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Its saved my ass countless times at work.
The only person that can get you the right answer is yourself. The three big options are RTFM, CBT, and onsite training. I use a combination of the three options. IEEE has some online training in around 800 subjects for $200/year. TestOut has a nice little certification training and exam prep package that will cover the OS side of what you need to cover. The Safari program from Oreily is one of the great deals in the industry for online documentation. I think the benefit of travel/in person training is more in networking and peer discussion than what the instructor has to say. Use the out of town trips for events where there's some roundtables or training on a topic you're struggling to grasp on your own.
STFU & GBTW
I've been sent to around six learning tree classes by my work over the last six years. I've got some certification from them in Windows 2000. The cert is meaningless to me, but the training was good and very valuable. All of the instructors were excellent, except for one that was a former pro baseball player - he wasn't very sharp.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Where do you want to be in 5, 10, 15 years?
Where does your boss think you should be in 5, 10, 15 years?
If these align, work on a plan that has you trained appropriately with what is useful today, next year, 5 years from now. A wide range of jobs makes your life more fun and you more valuable, IMHO. I've been an IT professional for 20 years now and never would have guessed I'd be an independent enterprise technical architect from where I started as job title "Programmer A" writing Space Shuttle GN&C code all those years ago.
For lack of knowing anything else, here's the path I took:
- Programmer A (Real-time development in HAL/S)
- Systems Analyst (added 20+ languages, still GN CMM Level 5)
- Senior Developer (switched to commercial languages C/C++ and publishing)
- Senior Developer (Cross platform development UNIX, Windows, Mac)
- Lead Developer @ a startup (employee #20!) Ran development teams, servers, and did everything for customers
- Consultant (to publishing company migrating from MVS to UNIX) mostly worried about security and good development practices
- Consultant (telecom - large scale systems that can never go down; *NIX, Windows and really strange telecom-only protocols) mostly worried about security and good development practices. Basically, if people can be replaced by a computer system and the money works out where computers can do the job better, then replace the people; humans have more interesting work than what a computer system can do anyway. We aren't hiring enough replacement workers for all the thousands that will retire in the next 5-10 years.
The final frontier for me is retirement in a few years. I plan to donate my time and skills to non-profit companies in need of automation.
Formal Training - almost none. I've always had a healthy curiousity and desire to learn. Books and a little data center at the house. Labs at work or production systems at prior jobs. I'm amazed at how real companies with critical software does development and testing when compared to most development shops out there. It is a scary world. I wish I'd stayed current with Java & J2EE training over the years. I wish I'd taken some formal Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX admin classes. Where I work, we have Lunch and Learns constantly - I always go whether it is EMC, HDS, MTI, Sun, IBM, HP, Cisco, Nortel, Lucent, BlueCoat, Microsoft, Bearing Point, Accenture, EY, NCR, Security Training or Oracle doing the training. During my commute, I listen to books on tape. A mix of computer podcosts, novels, and self-improvement (1-minute manager anyone?) At this stage, my position is as CIO. Knowing what each technology can provide, what the pitfalls are and how to integrate them into our overall strategy is important. Oh, and how much next month, next year, and 5 years from now will cost to implement - that's really important. Making all my people feel wanted and challenged. Helping them find a path up for their career and earning their trust over the years has been some of the most important lesson's I've learned. I'm nothing if my team doesn't work with me to solve real problems. We're all in this together and yes, some days, your boss is an idiot with pointy ears.
Look ahead to your ideal job in 10-15 years. What skills will serve you the best when you are there? Make a plan and take the first step in that direction. Learn Chinese, or Java, or Solaris admin, or begin a practical security certification program. The worst that will happen is you learn a lot. But the best that will happen is you get where you want to be, live a fun life, and absolutely love your work! Not too bad for a "Programmer A", huh?
I would recommend one of the redhat classes. About half of the training classes I have attended have been through redhat. I pay my own way sometimes for classes and when it comes to classes the only ones I'll put my money on are the redhat ones. So far I have been very satisfied with there classes and can't remember being bored during any of there classes. Each instructor is a little different and has different skills that they are willing to share (beyond just the course work). I've learned a few tips and tricks on how to more effectively use the vi editor and gotten help with some bash shell programs. Even had an instructor point out that one of the bash scripts in the manual, while it worked, was a bad example of coding and spent some time explaining what was wrong with it.
So with my money I try to look at what skills sets I need and look through the red hat catalogue to see if they have something on it.
I've never taken a SANS course but have heard good thing about it
Microsoft classes from my experience are a crap shoot. Sometimes you get lucky and get a good instructor and sometimes you just get somebody whose passing the time of day and will spend as much time talking about their drive to work or home repairs as they will about the material. But of course MS makes their stuff so straight forward and easy to use there's hardly any need for classes. I don't even know why they bother with documentation.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
The 20th annual USENIX LISA System Administration conference is in Washington DC in December. Lots of content, no fluff.
http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa06/
Disclaimer: I teach tutorials at USENIX conferences, but I've paid to attend many over the years
by Ramanujan R. Ramanujan.
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Immersion. If your in IT, then you understand computers. That said immerse yourself in any of the schools of thought and you'll pick it up. Case in point. I started Computers on Apple II and IIgs in '83-'89. '93 graduated High School and went to College. Had to learn basic Unix to do email, usenet, and compiling C progs my 1st year in College in '93-'94. Come '05 I hadn't really touched nix since college. Now I work for an entirely MS free company. We use Suse and Solaris only. Picked it up in no time. I will concede though the learning curve may be higher in a mixed environment though. If your not wary of command line though Nix remains fairly unchanged. If you grew up knowing MSDOS, Nix commmand line is a piece of cake. Just my opinion though.
Join the League of Professional System Administrators. We're a relatively new group, but we're growing quickly. You'll have an instant peer community to talk with, and a good peer community may be more important to your long term IT career then a few training classes. I also suspect that asking this question on the lopsa-discuss mailing list would generate a different set of suggestions from Ask Slashdot.
you learn best...classroom or read and play. Then take the suggestions presented and apply as you see fit. I would recommend buying the Linux Systems Adminstrator's Handbook, for a basic desk reference. If you learn best in a classroom, I like the Linux bootcamp for a comprehensive hands on. Otherwise, I think you are just as well off with the LSAH and a couple of O'Reilly books and a computer.
Curiosity will help you find out what you *WANT* to know. It may not help you find out what you *NEED* to know. (ie, what the industry wants you to know).
The IT industry is one of perpetual flux. Burn it into your mind that you must be continually getting certified. Build it into your budget. Build it into your schedule.
Take a few "extracurricular" courses as well (First Aid, CPR, Toastmasters, etc).
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
You can always learn Linux like I did. Go get a pound of pot, lots of beer, coffee, make sure Google.com is accessable, and (wish I had this when I started learning) the forums at http://forums.gentoo.org/ are imo the best place online for Linux help. (Using gentoo or not).
Your best friend will be man pages. Good luck in your Linux learning!
This same question was recently asked on the local Linux User Group mailing list with lots of postive feedback of Guru Labs Linux Training.
- July/008043.html
Here is the start of the thread:
http://www.sllug.org/pipermail/sllug-members/2006
I attented a class there and was very impressed by their extremely in-depth lab exercises (in many classes the labs are utter junk) and their excellent manuals. The instructors I met at Guru Labs are all extremely hard core and are contributers to many projects.
The best IT training I've ever had in 15+ years of taking a couple classes a year from various vendors.
A class in Abnormal Psych. Seriously.
How many people that call a help desk are experiencing acute anxiety?
How many VIPs at your company will think they are your exclusive supervisor?
How many bitter department secretaries will try to monopolize your time to show how important they are?
How many times will you hear: "don't help that person, I'm mad at them"?
How many times will you see a user make the same mistake over and over and over?
A class in abnormal psyche helps you spot the kooks early on. Every job has kooks, but in IT, you have more opportunities to interact with them.
Just a thought.
I assume that you have at least one year of working knowledge of software engineering. Learning any of the 29 or so languages from India is worthless; Their intercultural language is English. One could learn the Cantonese form of Chinese, but the Middle Kingdom is focusing on manufacturing, NOT service based solutions.
Software Engineers solve problems. HTML is pretty light weight for a software problem. Web services are console apps for the Internet. So what is a problem that a software engineer can solve, and get paid? How about learning:
1. Voice Based GUI Desktop Interfacing?
2. Manufacturing Robotics interfacing?
3. FAQ's that can pass the Turing Test.
I would take in consideration all of the suggestions for training listed above. After completing the training you should direct your conferences to something that will rejuvenate your energies.
1) E3
2) Mrs. Nude world
3) The Adult Video Awards
These, of course, are just a few suggestions.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Tell the manager it's just $12,000 and covers not just you but also ten other people concurrently from A+ to CCIE. I've tried many CBT materials, but Nuggets are what was most useful to me.
There is some seriously good information in those videos.
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
Get your hands on as many systems as possible.
Break these systems in as many ways as possible.
Fix these systems.
This will teach you A LOT. Not so much on the theory, but you'll gain a lot of real world practical understanding and be able to put the theory you get from various conferences, books, and classes into a proper context.
All peoples should go for HITB! Same trainers as Blackhat training but even better is not so expensiv!
http://conference.hitb.org/
San Francisco, CA Linux Expo August 14-18 next month. Great place to go for seminars, training, certification, and to find out more about what's going on in the world of Linux. For more info... http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/live/12/events/12SFO 06A
wilsonke "To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom." -- Socrates