I am a busy person. I work for a startup in the storage industry as a pre-sales engineer, and while Coho Data is an amazing and fun company to work for they do not have a solution for there only being 24 hours in a single day! I am requesting manipulation of the space time continuum as a new feature though. I am sure that the product managers will get right on that for me!
I am also working on my M.S. in Communication. Plus I have two children and a wife that I love and adore, so of course a good chunk of my personal time is enthusiastically spent with them. I maintain two blogs (and this is the hardest thing to find time for) that keeps me constantly looking for topics and time for writing articles. Occasionally I play games whether on a game console or in person with my friends around a tabletop. Busy, busy, busy!
What else do I need time for? Oh yeah! I need to find time for keeping my IT skills sharp! That is why I am very picky about the training resources that I will use and endorse. Today I want to share some of those resources that are focused on Linux with you. I am not compensated in any manner for endorsing these products, so everything that I write about here is based solely on my personal experiences as a customer.
Right now I am focused on refreshing and expanding upon my Linux skills. My Kindle is loaded with two great books:
- The PDF of William E. Shotts Jr.’s The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction which I wrote about before. This is a great resource that I cannot say enough good things about!
- The Kindle version of Brian Ward’s How Linux Works: What Every Superuser Should Know. This is another great gem of a Linux book!
Both of these great resources are available from No Starch Press, but be aware that their version is not the latest edition of Shotts’ book which I hope they make available soon. I did purchase their current release of this title just to show my support. I will be sure to check out more of their titles in the future based on the quality of these two books!
Another resource that I enjoy for keeping my Linux skills sharp is the online training provided by the Linux Academy. This site requires a paid membership in order to view their content, but they do offer some material for free via their YouTube channel. I reviewed some of their content on YouTube first and I liked it. I have decided to pursue the LPI Certifications and I noticed that the Linux Academy site was included in the LPI Certification Marketplace. I decided to go ahead and sign up for a one year pre-paid subscription. I am pretty impressed with their Linux +/LPIC Level 1 – Exam 101 course which I have completed one third of, and I have also completed to of their introduction courses just to get a feel for the site’s approach to Linux training. Needless to say I like what they provide and want to tell you about it!
I paid slightly over $200 for my subscription to the Linux Academy, and when you consider that a lot of certification books cost $50 for a single exam I feel that the Linux Academy is a much better value. You will have access to several different courses covering several different Linux distributions as well as other technologies (Ruby programming, Android development, Amazon Web Services, Chef, OpenStack, and more). The course that I am currently enrolled in is 30 plus hours alone, and that includes videos, quizzes, labs, downloadable reading materials, and access to the Linux Academy instructors and community if you need to ask questions about any of the lesson topics.
The cherry on top of the Linux Academy sundae is that you also have access to up to four Linux virtual machines for the labs! Now I have my own dedicated virtualization infrastructure in the home lab that can easily support sixty plus virtual systems at this time. I have access to my home lab from anywhere in the world using OpenVPN. I can also easily deploy Linux VMs on any of my laptops or home PCs using Oracle VM VirtualBox or other similar solutions. I don’t need to use the Linux Academy’s virtual machines.
Guess what? I end up using their virtual machines anyhow. The Linux Academy has made it incredibly convenient to use their labs. They made access to their on-demand systems easy and intuitive for their members. I feel that this is a real testament to the talent behind the Linux Academy. At the end of the day you get an extreme amount of value from your Linux Academy subscription!
So there you have it! These are some great resources that will help you to learn, refine, and expand your Linux skills with. Constant learning is the cornerstone for building your career as an IT professional, and I am sure that you cannot go wrong with any of the training materials that I touched upon in today’s article. Check them out, and come to your own conclusions, and if you like this article please be sure to share it with others as well!