Linux+ Passed (XK0-004) | My thoughts and the study tools I used.

hey welcome back to my basement this is jeremiah wolfe and today is uh september 9th it's a wednesday and a couple hours ago i passed i took for the first time in past the comptia comptia however you say it uh linux plus exam uh xk0-004 the uh the current linux plus exam so i just wanted to share my thoughts on it um what i used to study that kind of stuff and you know maybe it'll help you out um a couple of things just let me give you a little bit of background i don't normally talk about linux on this channel i don't normally talk about comptia so this might be your new to my channel so just a little real quick i have been out of i.t for many years i started in i t technically back in 1995 and sales if you could call that being part of it being in sales and then kind of progress from there i got my mcse and then eventually i became a senior systems engineer with my mcse nt4 mcse 2000. i wanted to move into networking so i got my ccna then i got my cc np ccdp design professional ccsp security professional from cisco and i was a senior network engineer at a couple different companies and then in 2013 i left it all together i started a business sort of pursuing a passion of mine and i've been doing that for the past seven and a half years and there's been some recent changes in my my situation my uh we have a baby on the way uh which will be here in another a couple of months and um you know looking at the finances and whatever the truth is i i've never made as much money as i used to in i.t with my own business and i feel like the while i could maybe get there one day it's been a slog and i don't see myself kind of making the money that i want to be making anytime soon it makes more sense to get back into i.t where we have a lot of more stability for my family with this baby on the way my wife and i are both a little bit older we're in our 40s so there's a lot of risks with having a baby at this age you know for her so you know when it comes to health insurance and stability uh you know income stability and all these things it seems like it's a it's a good time to go back into it so with such a huge break you know seven and a half or eight years that i've been out of the business it kind of made sense for me to get some certifications to get it on my resume kind of make my resume look good and then get back out there so i am actually working toward my ccie my cisco certified intern networking expert and thus far i have re-earned i have recertified as a csgo certified network associate ccna and as a ccnp network professional in enterprise with the specialization in routing and switching so that's where i am right now so uh since i've been back at this since um may april april mid-april when i started studying again uh today was my fourth test so in five months i've taken a little less than five months i've taken four tests and the reason i doing the linux plus is not because i have any particular interest in linux or that i want to be a linux administrator but the reality is that in today's modern world so much runs on linux and cisco itself is you know embracing more and more linux and we live in a world now where you see a lot of uh uh virtual appliances you know that are running on a vm or running on linux and so uh it's just it's you know it's where you need to be you need to know linux in today's world so um i said well hey if i got to learn it anyway i might as well get a certification to slap on the resume just you know make it look a little good so i i just went with comptia linux plus it's one test and it's well known so that's what i went with so let's take a look see how we did here is this the one i want this one okay so comptia linux plus and um let's see here so the passing score 720 and how do we do where's my pen at so look so i got 866 out of um required 720 this is really weird so if you look at um let's uh sorry yeah let's do let's do this so if you so here's my score 866 a passing score 720 but the range is 100 to 900 so i it's really hard to tell like with cisco exams um your score is pretty close to a percentage so if i got an 866 on a cisco exam that would be like an 86.6 percent you know roughly but between 100 and 900 i'm not sure how to interpret that so i think i did okay if the maximum score is 900 so i think i did okay but then again it also says that i i i missed questions and you know and all this here so um i don't know i don't know but i passed it and i just want to share my thoughts with it and tell you how i study how i studied so i started studying for this in um right the end of july so it's been almost exactly six weeks that i studied for this exam i think it's also worth saying that i have first off i haven't touched a linux system in years years um and even when i did i have you know it was at the level of a basic user you know like i just would log on to do a few very specific tasks i have never administered a linux box i've never installed a linux box i've just never had any interest to be frank and i'll maybe i'll share with some of those as a little bit later in the video my reasons why i just never really cared about linux but i haven't you know it's not it's not it's not a dig it just hasn't interested me and you know when you only have so much mental bandwidth to go with um i i just never really chose to go with linux so i was kind of coming into this with borderline zero uh real knowledge you know zero practical knowledge again you know i knew how to like ls and cd and i it i i used to be okay with vi like i used to get around and was comfortable with vi um but it i couldn't remember anything honestly when i got back into it so let's talk about uh the you know what i used to study so the first thing is obviously um books oh let me clear the uh the first thing is books and uh let's come back over here and so here's the first book that i picked up and sorry no that's not what i wanted anywho okay there we go so here's the first book that i picked up um the mcgraw-hill linux plus uh book and it's okay i'm just going to tell you this book this book is a flaming pile of dumb it is one of the it is the worst not one of it is the worst book i have ever tried to study from it's garbage this book do not buy this book don't waste your time the the reviews on amazon were mostly positive and i i don't understand how i do i just there are so many errors in this book first off okay first off the you think who knows how to make textbooks well mcgraw-hill should know how to take make textbooks it's what they do it's their only job is to make textbooks as far as i know and this is just the layout of it is horrible the order that they're teaching you things like if you have several years of linux experience you're already a linux administrator at maybe like a uh you know tier two kind of levels like a mid-level administrator um and you just need to review then maybe maybe i could recommend this book if you're already like have been exposed to all the concepts but even then i can't really recommend it because there are so many errors that basically when i sat down i read about a third of this book and when i sat down to read this book i basically had to have my tablet with me and i had to constantly be looking stuff up because i'd be reading them like that doesn't make sense and then i'd look it up and oh sure enough it's not how it's it's it's not how it's done there'd be so many typos so many errors and you're talking about a command line operating system here right where every little uh tick and dash and capital versus lowercase that all matters it all makes a difference a bracket versus a curly brace it matters and whoever edited this book had no idea like there was one the one thing that i remember because it's been a few weeks since i looked at this book but the one thing i remember was there was a a list and whoever was editing thought that the dash letter you know as a command switch uh or command option i don't know what you call i call them switches um was a thought it was a bullet point it wasn't supposed to be a bullet point it was actually the dash you needed the dash and so they they screwed it up uh that's just one example this is just it's a wretched wretch i just can't i'm i just can't say enough bad about this book the the it's just ugh ugh i just the sad thing was because i started with this book it got me off on such a negative mind space like i just going into this i really didn't you know it's one of those things where i love networking i'm interested in networking you know like network ospf eigrp bgp you know layer two stuff like all that stuff can be hard it can be complex it can be difficult but i enjoy it um i really wasn't looking forward to to the linux like it's not something that i i'm passionate about that i particularly enjoy so already i wasn't like geeked up and excited about it but then to start reading this book and it's just to be so bad it really it really kind of set you know got me off on the wrong foot so that was the first book that i attempted to read and then i tried this book um and okay this was like for me this was like coming home this was so if you're not aware so this is from pearson uh you're probably familiar with pearson because of that's who does the tests right pearson vue does the tests and pearson publishing is also also known as cisco press so many years ago when cisco decided to start publishing their own books they partnered with pearson i guess i never actually knew this until uh i always thought it was an independent company i had no idea that it was pearson um i guess i just never bothered to look but um cisco press is pearson so i have read dozens and dozens of cisco press books and um so the the the layout is very familiar to me i it's it's definitely geared toward learning it is it is written in a way that is geared toward learning and that's remains true for this book um all the the familiar conventions were there the way they write things the way they highlight things the the pre-chapter quiz the post chapter quiz um everything was there and so for me this book was infinitely better i mean just infinitely better than this book go with the pearson book or if there's a you know maybe there's a better one out there i don't know this might not be the best book but after my experience with this one i felt comfortable getting the pearson book and once i got it and was reading through it i was very glad with my choice this really changed things for me it everything makes just made so much more sense way way better okay so i read the books and then i have a cbt nuggets subscription so i wanted to you know also do that the cbt nuggets so let's take a look over here so cbt nuggets has a 16 hour course and all right i'm going to tell you right now i i have enjoyed my cbt nuggets experience so far i've used them for two cisco tests the cisco in our encore test in the nrc exam and i have found the material to be pretty good definitely helpful and overall my experience with cbt nuggets has been positive and i think i've now i had a subscription for like four months um however i really didn't care for this now again i'm gonna be you know just be up front i have some negative biases towards linux in general um for whatever reason well there are reasons and i'll explain it but um so maybe that's part of it but the truth is you know i i watched these videos and while the trainer was good the trainer is uh the sean powers guy look he's good he's energetic he's obviously excited he uh based on things that he's he has said in the course he has been doing linux for many years and it is as far as i can tell based on what he said it is his primary career path as a linux system administrator which he has done for various companies or organizations so he knows what he's doing he has real world experience and but that's kind of what came through in this a lot more rather than like watching one of these videos and walking away and saying okay i understand that as someone who is new to this instead i kept walking away thinking wow he really convinced me that he knows what he's doing but he hasn't helped me to know what i'm doing if that makes sense a lot of it was like you know there's just one example one example i don't even remember what the command was i think it was netstat we're talking about netstat and he he keeps talking about how he likes to use the options dash t-u-n-a-tuna and he so you know it's easy to remember obviously i remember it dash tuna um but i don't know why i can't tell you why he did that he never went through and said why use this switch for that i use this switch for that and all together does that and let's compare to some other choices and this is why you you i think that this is the best uh option set of options to use like it was never like that it was just like okay there's command okay there's the output moving on okay now to the next thing and you're like whoa you're not i didn't feel like i was learning i felt like i was watching someone type cisco or type excuse me linux commands so i it's really i feel bad because i do like cbt nuggets the price is great the organization seems good the people seem genuinely like really good people who really want to help you know uh other people in their career but i just got very very little out of this so basically you know i would read read the book this is kind of my mo i like to to read the book and then watch the associated videos um as a kind of a way to uh so i read the book you know one day and then i watch the videos the next day and i kind of use that as a way to sort of reinforce what i'm learning and you know i got a little bit out of it but um i just i if i were to do this again i would have just skipped this all together the other thing that is is i don't you know i'm being very negative about it but i'm not going to bother looking for it but in a couple of the other courses i did with cbt nuggets they had fantastic labs just fantastic labs and you actually you know you can remote into their lab server system thing and you know you're you're on the command line of a cisco device and you're doing you have multiple devices and you can and ping and there's a workstation you connect to to you know test things so really great labs um and for the nrc exam the last exam i did there was labs for almost every single one of these these subject points whatever you call them however i think for this entire course there's maybe five labs tops there's also several videos where he's talking as if you're supposed to be doing a lab but there is no lab like it was never set up it's not listed in the software you know in the in the interface here so i think there's a few labs that maybe he had intended to do that just never got done but even the labs that he does do like they're they're just weak they're just weak it's just a lot of like here's exactly what to type okay that worked now play around and for someone who's learning it's like just just play around doesn't really help like you know yes that is a valid way of learning but the same time it's like well let before we do the play around like maybe you should actually teach us a little bit more maybe we should go through and explain some of the differences like let's compare the output with this set of options versus that set of options let's talk about why you would use once one command over another like actually teach instead of just like here's a command okay go play around like well that wasn't helpful so while i love cbt nuggets in general in this instance uh it just i got nothing out of it nothing out of it okay so that was sort of the the instruction portion i had the books i had the videos now i wanted to do some labs and i started looking around and i was really struggling to find uh labs to do i just couldn't find anything good so i i first came across um this book here so what i did was i bought this book 101 labs comptia linux plus it's supposed to be for the the newest version of the exam and it's exactly what it says it's 101 labs and so what i did was i set up a couple of vms just running on my windows box and they actually they have a specific i think they recommend ubuntu i forget um and then what i did was i bought the kindle version so on one monitor i had the kindle version of that book opened up and on the other monitor i had the vm and i just kind of went through the labs but after about so it's 101 labs i did about 15 of them and i was just very disappointed just very disappointed again i'm you know this this is going to be recurring theme if you're looking to get all super upbeat i'll we'll get there but this isn't it just yet so this book uh man just didn't do it for me again it was like it was weird because they would say okay here's the lab type out this command and he would use these like really long commands with all these switches and stuff and you're like i'm not sure what's going on and yes yes i could have opened up the man pages and dissected everything but i feel like you know i don't know i feel like that's asking a bit like tell me why you're doing it that way a lot of the labs again were just like you know years ago it's been so long but back in in the earlier part of my career a few times not often because it was always very expensive but a few times i got to go to some classes actual you know real classes and i think it was it was like global knowledge global something anyway i forget so these were like three to five thousand dollar classes they were usually a week long i'd usually have to travel so the company is paying for hotel paying for meals paying for rental car oftentimes and then on top of the class so for the company you know this was a this is an expensive investment you know maybe seven eight thousand dollars so it go to this class and you sit through the classroom portion and then it came to the labs and they'd have these nice spiral bound lab workbooks and you would the the the last class that i remember was a cisco um call manager class that i did and so you know it's relatively complex stuff setting up all these you know the phone system and call manager and all the associate stuff and you know this was i don't know 12 13 years ago um and i remember flipping through the lab book as we're doing it and it's just like step one do this step two do this step it was literally like click here click here click there type this now click here hit enter type this click here and when you get to the end you're like okay yes i've technically done this stuff but don't ask me to do it again i don't know anything and that's kind of what i the feeling that i was getting with this um this book here was like yes i was doing things but i wasn't learning anything at all and and the other thing was i think the the final straw was i did a lab i followed it exactly and it actually broke my vm i had to reset the vm i i think i had to reinstall no i figured out how to fix it but it was like if you haven't even i'm using the exact software release that you that they told me to i did the exact commands that they told me to and it didn't work and not only did it not work it actually prevented my vm from booting so uh at that point i was like you know i'm done with this i contacted amazon and got a refund which by the way was an interesting process because it was a kindle book i've never asked for a refund on a kindle book and i had i had to talk to like four different people before they could figure out apparently it's just not a normal thing i don't know but they didn't give me a hard time about it they just kept saying um i'm gonna have to transfer you it was all it was all chat it's all chat okay so that was that well i still needed some labs so i went to my old standby that i love i always use their practice tests whenever possible they're just fantastic fantastic i can just never say enough good stuff about boson well they have this practice test it's our excuse my practice test labs it is 100 bucks it ain't cheap so 100 but i went ahead and did it and let's just take a look at it here um hopefully it doesn't show anything because i really don't want to actually did it okay good i was afraid that it was showing like my license key or something so uh there's like 60 labs here obviously i didn't finish the last couple of them and these are really good so it starts off it explains what you're doing what you're going to get out of it how long it should take it gives you the topology although this is the exact same for every single lab it's exact same topology you have three virtual machines you have a centos machine an ubuntu machine and then a windows machine that acts as various roles depending on the lab and then you get into the actual lab it does walk you through step by step but what i really love about this was it actually gives you uh explanations not for everything they're very clear it says we're not going to teach you any theory but even so though they say that they do explain a lot of why are we doing it this way why are we doing it that way now there are some labs where it's just like okay type this command dash u now type this command dash f now this command dash e i don't know whatever and but they never explain why you're doing that they don't so it's kind of to you to like try to find the differences and look at the man pages so it wasn't perfect like as far as an instructional tool but so much better so much better than the um that 101 labs thing so um so as you can see you kind of you get into uh it's still booting up here it's normally actually quite a bit quicker i don't know what's taking so long well it must be a lot of people using it today or something but anyway so you you get into um either the centos or the ubuntu machine maybe they're having some kind of problem uh i think there was one time i had a problem with it i just had to like reset the entire thing there it goes and it worked but yeah i don't know what's going on here just slow i guess uh oh there it goes so you know you just get on there and you can do what you need to do excellent tool as always boson now this is actually i think boson is like reselling this i don't think they actually did this and if you look at if you come back here because boson is only selling as far as i could tell specifically for the linux plus but if you look at the exam exam objectives it also has the exam objectives for the lpi exams so there's obviously a lot of overlap so yeah anyway i would say personally i probably learned just as much if not more from these labs as i did from this book and again the videos it kind of reinforced some things but i didn't really learn a whole lot from the videos i really really like these labs i highly recommend it you know if you're look if if you already have experience and you just want to go through the book and practice you know what you see in the book you don't really need a structured lab then do that but if you're like me you don't have a lot of experience or if you're like me of zero experience and you really need someone to walk to tell you what to practice this this tool was fantastic so let's log out of there um okay so at this point i am i've read one on one and a third books i've done a 16-hour course i've uh done some practice labs and it's clear to me that uh i'm still lacking i don't have what i need and i what i really want is some practice tests and because you know the practice test it's a different thing than just reading a book you're reading the book they're giving you all kinds of information and yes you know you could take notes and reread the book and you're going to kind of cement some more of that information but it's not the same as being asked questions that kind of it's a different mindset it's a different way of thinking about things and i really feel it's important for a lot of things to have that practice test so i got to looking and my favorite as i've said before is boson i love both practice exams and unfortunately for comp tia they have no linux so i was kind of like dang what am i going to do so i start looking around and i'm looking for practice tests searching on google there's some um on you udemy that just look kind of cheesy there's there's like a book or two on amazon that didn't get good reviews uh i'm just i'm not having any luck so i'm like okay let's go to comptia let's look and see what they have they have like an official um thing and here it is so comptia here's their linux plus exam prep bundles you can get the voucher for 329 you can get the basic bundle excuse me for 450 or you get the exam prep bundle for hundred dollars but here's the thing the only one that comes with the practice now here's the thing when i saw this i thought comptia a cert master practice i thought practice test it's a test if you're doing practice it must be a practice test well kind of and this was a hard pill to swallow at 600. i mean it's just a lot of money now what you get you get the exam voucher and that voucher comes with a retake so if you fail you get to retake it ebook whatever couldn't care less but this is what i wanted the cert master practice so so i bought it i spent 600 on this thing and well we'll come back to that so here it is this is their cert master thing as you can tell oh you can't say it's it's actually provided by amplifier so again i don't think this is i don't know how if comptia subcontracted this out or what but you have these um thank you so you have each of the primary um points of focus whatever it's called for the exam and then you have all so all the all the objectives exam objectives are covered and then you go to each one and let's see what we can see and it will give you questions a lot of questions so here's 59 questions just for this one little area uh of of the exam objectives so all told there's i think it's like 700 or 800 questions total at first i was really excited i thought oh fantastic but then i started going through now i did every single one of these questions i did the practice test i don't know why it doesn't show it i did every single one of these questions and it's kind of a nice system because basically the way it works is it asks you the question if you get it right you move on if you get it wrong it'll it'll work it back into the the subset of questions i think you have to get everything right if you've got it wrong once you have to answer it right two or three times before it'll finally kind of fall out of the rotation so make sure that you you have gotten everything right and at first i was feeling pretty good about this comptia practice thing but then the more i did it what i started to see is that one a lot of the questions weren't not wrong but incomplete or inaccurate and what i started to realize was that at least for the vast majority of these these exam objectives and related questions what it was was it looked like they had hired an intern and they said here's the book uh just flip through the book and make questions about this chapter because it was like it would like quote which was clearly part of a textbook and then you were supposed to pick the right answer and because of that a lot of things were out of context and were like well yes technically that's true but it's actually a lot more complex than that so it's not really the best ultimately after doing almost 800 questions i did the practice test and these i'm sorry i'm not clicking on it i'm not showing it uh after doing the practice test these all 800 of these questions they didn't help they didn't help at all it was i was so angry i was such a huge waste of time like just a giant waste giant waste i was so so annoyed so annoyed with this whole thing well at this point i'm like okay i uh the test is coming up i i don't i think i'd already scheduled at this point i need a better practice test i need something that's actually going to test me not just give me like this these were just like stupid little trivia questions that were i mean it was like most of it was super easy especially if you've seen it once you know you're gonna it's just super easy and was nothing like the level of the questions that were in the act this practice test once i did this practice test i'm like oh okay i am not prepared not prepared um well i got like a 78 i got a just i didn't pass the practice test just barely didn't pre pass it but my thing is with these vendor provided practice tests they are almost always significantly easier than the real test so in my mind if i just barely failed this i'm gonna really fail the real test i need to like hardcore pass the practice test like almost 100 percent score to even be you know to get a decent score in the test that's just been my experience with the dozens and dozens of industry tests that i've taken over the past 20 years so i start looking for another practice test and again i'm just finding all these things i want to as much as possible avoid a brain dump i do not want test questions i think that's unethical i think it's immoral i think it's wrong um i was having such a hard time finding actual you know someone who sat down and made a practice test so finally what i found was this this test prep training this is not legit so it's 16 585 questions and there's very little uh overlap in these questions so it's 585 mostly unique questions um and uh i mean i don't they were it was so much better so much better than this stuff like way better a lot of them i would say 20 of them were wrong they had the wrong answer and here's the thing they stole these questions i'll tell you right now they did not write these questions which you know for 16 i i kind of suspected that going into it but i just didn't have a choice like i could not find anything else i i wanted a good set of questions like i saw these lots of websites were selling test questions like 30 test questions for 30 it's like that's no i'm not buying that so this was one of the better study tools that i found just because it was just such a huge number of questions and basically what i had to do because so many of these the the correct answer was wrong in this their software basically i had a vm opened and a web browser and for every question i would pick what i thought the answer was and then i would go research it i'd either try the command on the command line or i would go find a read the man page or look for an explanation online and so because of that it took me like i don't know a week and a half to get through these questions like it was brutal i only had time to look at every question once i usually like to go back and review but there just was not enough time because it was such a huge manual pro i couldn't trust any of the answers that they gave so i had to go out and you know find all the answers on my own so because of that it was a good study tool however like they've obviously stolen these questions now in the past i have bought practice tests that once you get into it based on like some of the like they're like xyz company is doing this and you need to do that so what's the proper answer once you cut you're like oh shoot like they don't change the xyz company and it tells you who actually wrote the question basically like so in the past i have bought these kind of things and then went and you know bought it from the real company because i want the people who are actually putting forth the effort to get my money but there was no such thing i don't know where they got these questions from there i will tell you that there there were a couple in here that were eerily close to things i saw on the actual exam but i wouldn't call this a brain dump because it wasn't like it was just a couple of questions out of 585 that were very similar to what was on the exam um but there was nothing where there was exact so i don't think this was like a brain dump i don't know where they got the questions from so i don't know like i feel bad because obviously they they are profiting off of um you know theft of someone else's hard work but i didn't feel like i had i couldn't find the actual thing i don't know what to do excuse me let me uh get a cough here [Music] oh i muted me i didn't mute you sorry for coughing in your ear wrong button okay so let's go through the breakdown here um what do we got we got a pen we got that we'll come over to white okay so let's take a look take a look at books uh videos labs practice test and then i'm just i don't know how to kind of bundle in that comptia bundle so i'm just going to call it the comp tia oops um so because that's the the actual exam voucher and their practice test piece of garbage so books i spent a hundred and three dollars videos was one month subscription of cbt nuggets and sixty three dollars um the labs just the boson labs not that lab book i included that in the books it was 100 the practice test was 16 and then the comptia was 600 for a grand total of 880 dollars that i spent now let me be real clear i have been a hiring manager many times i have managed throughout my career many several teams of guys engineers from help desk up to senior you know more senior level engineers and i have never never given any weight to someone with a comptia certification i am not impressed i can also say that i think i am in the minority there people who basically what happens is the comptia certification is going to make sure that hr sees your resume and passes it on to the hiring manager so with that on your resume you're more likely to get passed on to the person the final person probably isn't going to be too impressed by it that's just a reality because you know i had my a plus i got my a plus back in like 20 oh like 90 i think it was like 99 1999 i got my a plus certification and this is how i study for the a plus i went and got a book i went to this is this was back in the day so we actually went to the store and bought books um i wouldn't bought a book that was no bigger than this it was the smallest book i could find i skimmed it the night before my exam i skimmed it i went in the parking lot of the exam i memorized very quickly the irq the rqs and the dma channel numbers i walked in the exam and back then it was a hardware exam and a software exam i took both exams back to back passed them walked out had my a plus the only reason i did it was because my employer required it and the only reason my employee required it was because this whole it certification thing was relatively new and they just didn't know any better but there are still people that require these sorts of certifications so i having taken this exam having passed this exam and done okay on it you know i got it 866 with out of a maximum of 900 so i did okay if if not pretty good i don't know i do not feel even remotely qualified for even a junior level linux administrator position the problem with this test is that it is so broad there are so many they want you to basically know every something about just about everything you'd ever have to do as a linux administrator so rather than saying okay if you're a links administrator you need to know all this and you need to know all this this deep so this is a true linux administrator all this knowledge well rather than saying okay what we're going to do is we're going to focus on this and we're going to go like half deep so a subset of skills the things that everybody really needs to know we're going to go you know a little deep not all the way a little deep so you go into a job you can sit down and you can do all the the tasks that a junior level administrator is going to have to do rather than doing that approach which would actually make you a valuable employee they said no we want you to know all the same things that a more senior administrator would want to know but instead of knowing it all this much we just need to know it this much so all of those things and you don't know any of them with any real depth so this test is in my opinion a test on your ability to memorize commands and memorize directories that is it you do not in my opinion this does not prepare you for a job as a linux administrator this prepares you to demonstrate that you have the ability to memorize things it if it angers me because even now after passing this exam i don't feel comfortable sitting sitting down in front of a lynx machine and doing very many things one of the things that frustrates me is you know let's say you're getting a job as a linux let's say you're you're setting up a training program for a linux administrator and what do you want to do you want to you want to pick the the the top skills that you're going to need and you want to drill those into someone teach them you want them to walk away understanding the how and the why how does it work why does it work how do you troubleshoot it you know why do you use these commands versus those commands that's what you want someone to know that's that's hard to you can't do that with the hugely broad number of topics in this book the other thing is oh what was i going to say that'll come back to me in a second so it just it frustrates me because i don't think this prepares anyone for a job and i don't think that if you see this on someone's resume which i'm going to put it on mine so if you're a potential employer and you found this video of mine or something like you know what it is what it is but um if you're a potential if you're an employer and you see this this doesn't mean that they have the ability to sit down and do stuff on your linux machines it means that they have the ability to memorize a crap ton of commands and a crap ton of directories that's all this that's all this test is it's just memorization of commands and directories it's very little true understanding very little true knowledge it is my opinion that at least for this exam and i've had this opinion for a long time about comptia so this kind of reinforced that opinion but it is my opinion that comptia um contrary to how they appear they appear as a company that is there to train people to certify people to prepare them for entry level positions uh no based on my experience with this they are a company that is designed to get you to buy more training material if you read their book you'd be like oh crap i don't know enough that's why you're going to get that bundle that's why they get that 600 bundle with all those pointless questions and then why do they give you the the exam the retake voucher what other testing company or what other certification program gives you a retake voucher that's telling you oh there's a pretty good chance you're going to fail they do that because they know that you're going to go take it you're going to fail and then you're going to want you're going to have to buy more training material and their trading material is so subpar that it like they it's just it's it's so i spent 800 and 82 on this exam uh way more than i spent on any of the cisco certifications that i have way more so it's just it it kind of it makes me angry because i feel like they're taking advantage of people it reminds me of itt technical institute i used to we used to have an itt that was literally down the block like down the street from this company i used to work for and because we were a technology company we were so close to itt like our we had some people to go participate in their job fairs or whatever and we definitely hired people from itt for entry level positions but you know when when someone came from itt one that wasn't what i was doing you know they would get in the help desk or one of our other departments so i never hired anyone from itt because we i was whatever that was i was in engineering it was just we didn't hire entry level people um but the thing that drove me nuts was these people would come from itt with between 30 and sometimes like 40 000 of debt for and they would have the skill set of someone who had been practicing and reading in their own spare time for about six months if i had someone who had a an interest in computers and had been reading some books and you know practicing some stuff on their computer in their spare time for the past six months they would have the same skill set as someone coming from itt with thirty thousand dollars in debt and this you know diploma and i'm sorry if you attended it there are people for whom itt it was a godsend but the vast majority of people that i worked with from there it it was the only thing they they got from that was debt everything else they could have taught themselves in a matter of months so that's kind of what i feel about this comptia like it is it's designed basically to to separate you from your money in a way that is it feels it feels unethical it's kind of gross but you know maybe i'm completely wrong and it's just that i just don't not a big fan of linux and so i got this huge chip on my shoulder i'm willing to admit that all that might be true but anyway so those are all my thoughts oh you know i dab man this video is so long i wanted to talk about some of the things that were actually on the exam just real quick uh the types lots of multiple choice questions um there was nothing where you had to type there were like drag and drop where you had like complete they give you like this whole big list of commands and you'd have to like pick the components to to populate the commands um other than that it was just you know it was it was stuff that was in in the book uh just you know you there's a lot of you just basically you really got to memorize all those directories and all the commands the one thing i will say the one thing i will say was i can't say it's about all of the questions regarding commands but i can comfortably say the vast majority of the questions that involved commands where at first blush you're like oh i don't remember all the the switches i don't remember what sl dash a or you know like i i feel like you do definitely need to know the more common switches for the more common commands but at the same time for most of the questions where there were like long commands with like multiple commands and pipes and and whatever and multiple switches and you had you know you have four different options usually there was something about each of the possible answers that gave it away as being false like the way that it was written you just wasn't valid there would be something that would invalidate it and so you it at first blush it would be intimidating because you think oh i don't know what all that means but then when you actually look at it you're like oh it can only be c because c is the only one that's actually written in a valid syntax for whatever reason so as you're going through the exam if you when you come across those pause and read everyone and compare them and it'll usually pop out to you like oh that's why that one's wrong and that one's wrong this is right so other than that there's really no you know there's nothing that i can tell you like oh make sure you know this make sure you know that it was just it was all it was all over the place which is my big complaint about this certification in general just it's all over the place all right uh okay man once again i was sure i could do this in like 20 minutes and here we are 53 minutes i hope you stuck around and got something out of it thanks for watching i'm jeremiah see you next time

Channel: Jeremiah Wolfe

Views: 11,907

Rating: 4.9449224 out of 5

Keywords: CompTIA, Linux+, IT Career

Id: FSRqc8mpWi8

Length: 53min 29sec (3209 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020