Red Hat RHCSA/RHCE 7 Cert Guide: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (EX200 and EX300) (Certification Guide)

Excellent guide that will take you over the finish line. I recently passed RHCSA using this guide and I love both how book is organized and how material is presented. Sander will help you make that leap from a Linux enthusiast to a confident system administrator. Delivery of facts is concise and perspective is given exactly where needed, there's almost no fluff, it's all instructions but not authoritarian and dry.I like how much emphasis is given to making the material memorable to the candidate. There's a quiz BEFORE the start of a chapter, and quite a few exercises and quizzes AFTER the end of chapter. Keep the DVD that comes with the book, it's a great accompaniment to the book itself.Make sure you register the book with the publisher to be able to access the extra content online, which is basically the DVD itself only online. Great if your machine doesn't have a DVD drive.Of particular help were howtos on server setup against which you can test how much you know about setting up your client to authenticate to those servers. You can set those servers yourself in a virtual machine and this guide has a howto on setting the server up, or you could also use an already configured virtual machine (that is also provided on the DVD that comes with this guide) and import it into your hypervisor of choice (mine was VirtualBox, Sander recommends VMWare product).I did not attend the official Red Hat course and this guide was not the only resource I used to study for the exam. I also took the RHCSA course on Linux Academy and went through most of tutorials found on Cert Depot.

This is pretty good. I would recommend this book. The author not only has the book but a website of videos to go along with it. I am an RHCSA/RHCE under RHEL 6. I am studying to update my certs for RHEL 7. Some of the topics covered in this book are no longer a part of the test. The author has a chapter on the basic Apache Web Server for the RHCSA. That was on the test for RHEL 6 RHCSA. Red Hat does not indicate that is part of the RHEL 7 RHCSA test from their. However, since a major portion of the RHCE is on Apache the introduction still is good.The author is confident on his topics and it shows. I am a Michael Jang fan but his books do not come out till later this year. I used both in the past.

Great delivery with Amazon, faster as expected I got the great guide delivered to my door.As UNIX/Lnux professional (15 years Sun/AIX from origin) naturally got into the Linux playing fields.Always work and needed a efficient way to add to my knowledge what is needed for the RHCSA and RHCE Certifications.As I already have my RHCSA on RHEL6 reading up on known parts refreshed my memory and gave good insights on the new parts of RHEL7, needed to make sure I can start the RHCE Certification Exams. Previously used the J. books but this one is more to the (Certification) point but also can be used later to look up items not used in daily operations. Some small first print issues but publisher reassures me they have fixed.Great set of test images (yes you need te tweak the network settings to make them work in your Virtual environment, but you should be able to do that. -Or maybe skip ahead a little and learn from the chapters later on how to do that) and Video content.Would recommend.

I am an IT Manager for a Unix/Linux infrastructure, and I have also been a Red Hat Enterprise Engineer for a number of years. I am Red Hat certified in RHEL 7 (and previous versions), but I purchase Red Hat books for reference and for the people who work for me and with me. In my honest opinion, I have to say that this is the worst book I have come across and I highly recommend not purchasing this book if you are new to Red Hat and wish to get certified.First, I have to give credit where credit is due. This author does a great job at teaching Red Hat practice and theory. We need more of this and don’t often see it modern RHEL books. Most of the literature out there teaches syntax and practical application. This author instead spends more time teaching how and why something works the way it does instead of giving you syntax and every switch out of a man page. This is fantastic and this author is both well-educated and a remarkable teacher. I would turn to this author for answers to technical questions and hold his advice in high regard no questions asked.If you put that all aside and look at the book as a student, this should be scrapped and worked from the ground-up in my professional opinion.This book is filled with numerous errors. I understand we are all human (authors included), but the number of spelling, grammatical, and structural errors are far too many to have passed a technical review. As far as Pearson Certification books go, I am very disappointed. I put a lot of trust into Pearson IT Certification books and have used them for the CCNA and CCNP coursework. However, they have let a book not ready for publishing go to print and it does not appear they had enough eyes, reviewers, or technical QA departments look it over. This is not something I expect from them being industry experts.The author spends a lot of time telling the reader about commands, but doesn’t always tell the reader when to enter a command and when not to. He uses full commands in the middle of sentences and it is often unclear as to whether you should try them or not. So, many of the commands fail because he is merely talking about them when he really isn’t expecting you to enter them.Next, there are too many spelling errors. For example, there is an entry in the section about user authentication where he tells you to install the ‘sshd’ package when he really means the ‘sssd’ package. While a professional may understand what he “means” and be able to adjust accordingly, a beginner might not. This will most certainly lead to frustration.The virtual machines that are available for download do not work as he states they do. There is a virtual machine that should have IPA installed and ready to go, and two machines that act as servers (in their own right) but clients to the IPA server. After downloading the IPA virtual machine, I noticed that some of it is installed and configured and some of it is not. A beginner will not know what to go look for and add to it to make it a working server. As a trained engineer, I even struggled to find out what he installed and what was missed. It actually took several hours to make the IPA server a working server.Finally – the entire education on LDAP, IPA, and user authentication is broken in this book. IPA and identity management is a big concept for the RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer) certification. He has an appendix that teaches the user how to download, install, and configure an IPA server. This is great because people need to know how to do this. However, the appendix instructions need several adjustments in order to get it to work. He is missing a package in the instructions that is needed for DNS to work and some of the steps are out-of-order.Chapter 6 (RHCSA section) instructs the user to connect to that IPA server and there are several problems. First, after it is all said and done, the connection to the IPA Server using NSLCD doesn’t work. Second, there are two users that need to be set up on the IPA server before you start chapter 6, but then after you set them up, chapter 6 asks you to connect to that server and change to a user that doesn’t even exist. He also asks you to create a user that was already set up in the appendix, so essentially you are trying to create a user that already exists. There are even screenshots in the section that aren’t even the screen you are supposed to be looking at.Chapter 25 (RHCE section) attempts to connect to that same server using SSSD, and several things break in the process. It takes a trained expert to be able to identify those problems and fix them while reading his instructions.When you put all these chapters together, the entire subject of external authentication (LDAP, Kerberos, SSSD, NSLCD, DNS) does not work. There are several chapters that each has a piece that relies on another piece, and they are all missing something. If you are a beginner and wish to learn about external authentication, you need to know that the entire book is broken. From cover to cover, the entire subject of authentication is broken. You will spend more time with heartache then you will learning the practical steps needed to become an expert in external authentication.As somebody who is Red Hat certified, I have spent two weeks with the various chapters dealing with LDAP, IPA, and authentication in general. Overall, I have not been able to get anything working correctly the way the author states to do it. IPA is sensitive anyway. It has several moving parts and when one of them doesn’t work, the whole concept suffers. This only adds to the fact the Red Hat Enterprise 7 is quirky anyway and has more downsides than it does positives (but that is personal opinion). When you add a book full of mistakes to a touchy operating system and an identity management system that seems to fail more than it works, it makes for a difficult time for a studentI hate to say this, but after reading two books about Red Hat 7 and finding them both unteachable, the only literature I would put faith into is that directly from the Red Hat Corporation. Unfortunately, most people cannot afford $3,000+ dollars on the coursework to get firehose training for 4 days. I understand books from Amazon are the economical solution, but you must research what is out there before you make a decision. Unfortunately, this one is worse than the first book that came out.Please understand that these are the opinions of one person. I am an IT Manager. I am an Engineer. I am a Developer. I am a practitioner. And, I am always a student. However, after looking at it from all angles, I absolutely must recommend against this book. I don’t usually hesitate to assist authors with errata. We all write with errata. I write IT documentation for the Department of Defense and I expect people to find flaws with my writing too so that the peer-review process can achieve the highest-quality possible while still allowing for that human aspect of error.Aside from the complaints, this author has a lot of potential and could be one of the best if he just critiqued his own work and had IT professionals critique it. If there was a complete QA process from infancy to publishing, this could be the one person we have been waiting for to teach the world what they need to know about Red Hat. Being a published book from Pearson IT Certification, I would assume that it had to go through some checks and balances. But once you read it, you will see that it seems to lack a lot of that. In fact, I am speechless when looking at the errors, problems, and failures.Pushing the mistakes aside, I loved reading about this theory and approach. Unfortunately though, this one just didn’t make it.

It could be easily a 5 star, but definitely needs a second edition, because of the high amount of errors. Typos, wrong switches, mixed commands, grammatical errors everywhere. It has errors almost on every page!Apart from that, a very detailed and easy-to-read book for the RHCSA-RHCE exams.

Well written and comprehensive. I've passed two RHCE exams and I like the format of this book.

Helpful!

Brilliant product, questions related to textbook and exam syllabus. Several items to help with study and skills

Great book to support the exam!