Passing Linux+

I recently passed the CompTIA Linux+ Certification and I want to pass on what resources I used that helped me pass the certification.

I am going to outline what resources I used, what I recommend and what to focus on. To prepare for this exam, I drilled extensively in the practice exams. I hand wrote the questions to memorize what common answers are for the various types of questions. This is important because the test is multiple choice and helps with speed and question recognition. Writing the questions down showed me what I needed to focus on in the book that is listed below. This may seem to be the cart before the horse, but I just wanted to pass because it more width exam as opposed to depth.

Read the objectives, which are available for free from comptia.org.

If there is any interest in where my knowledge was deficient, please post a comment. I will do an additional blog post what sections in the objectives I missed questions on.

Book

I only purchased a single book to prepare for the exam due to the promise of practice tests in the attached CD. The book purchased was:

Mike Meyers' Linux+ Certification Passport (Mike Meyers' Certficiation Passport) (Paperback)
By Michael Jang

It is available from Amazon.

The book’s material is laid out in the same order as the test objectives as outlined by CompTIA. The questions at the end of each chapter are relevant to the test and provide some explanation to why each answer is right or wrong. Overall, the material is very good and reading it helped me pass the test. In some cases, it can be very wordy and not relevant to what is going to be asked you in the exam.

I would recommend this book to help fill in holes of knowledge. In my case, printer and dhcp questions are where this material helped.
There is another aspect of this book that I believe is much more beneficial than the material printed on the pages and that is the practice exam CDs. The practice exams were excellent. They showed you what type of questions to expect on the exam. Again, this book is highly recommended.

Websites

I used the following websites for additional practice exams/questions and study sheets. You will have to peruse some of these to get to the information, but the search is worthwhile. Best of all, this test preparation is free.

http://www.vtc.com/products/CompTIA-Linux-plus-Certification-tutorials.htm
http://www.mcmcse.com/comptia/linux/studyguide.shtml
http://www.exampractice.com/certification/linux/q1.shtml
http://www.certification-crazy.net/linux+_practice.htm
http://www.certification-crazy.net/linux+_study.htm
http://www.passitnowcom/lin1.html
http://www.scribd.com/doc/18280/Linux-Certification-Exam-Study-Guide.

What to focus on

I do not want to violate the NDA. I am merely trying to get you the information you need to help you pass the certification. There is nothing tricky with the material in regards to the test. It will map directly to the objectives. If you take the above practice exams will be surprised by very little.

WARNING: Before you go in be very familiar with the BASH shell, which you will be from the above tests, because the test is based on BASH. There is an opportunity to miss questions due to the differences in the shells.

The test is complete based on command line system administration which done as one is logged into root. Be very familiar with the command line. GUI knowledge will not help you.

A big chunk off the exam is:
- Know the purpose of every major configuration file. Know the /etc directory, be the /etc directory.
- Know all of the command-line tools/calls/operations and their function.
- Know the commonly used switches above the command-line calls/operations
- Know the major settings in the configuration files

The Purpose of the Blog

I. Motivation for Starting this Blog
I am currently a thirty year-old government employee computer engineer and therein lay the point of this blog. There is no way in the current job environment that government employees’ employment will not be impacted due to decreasing tax roles. There are things happening in our economy that will radically change the engineering field and this site is a way to adapt to the changing way of communicating technical ideas and to keep up with new tools. Time Magazine had a very good article talking about the change about the way things work. It is listed below:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1898024_1898023_1898086,00.html

II. The Technologies we will look at
I want to go through the process of becoming relevant technically with an on-line journal. This journal will consist of screen captures (camstudio.com) and text descriptions of the exercises I go through to learn these technologies. To start, we will go through the following items/technologies to give tutorial so any readers can follow along.

- Visual Studio .NET 2008 (C#, Java)
- Android
- Go
- VHDL


III. Job Searching and Freelance Website Exploration
I also hope to go through some of the freelance websites because that is where many of the future coding opportunities will be for engineers. I also believe the idea of big engineering firms is dead. There will be increased free-lancing and contract jobs that act as internships for full-time jobs with companies.

Programming Bids
Rent a Coder

This will act as our outline for where the website will go and what we will go over.