On Fri, Dec 06, 2002 at 01:18:31PM -0500, Mark Post wrote: > Because I was one of the first people at the VM/VSE Tech Conference to take > an LPI certification exam, I was one of the people who obtained a free copy > of the O'Reilly "LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell" book. I would > recommend it to anyone who isn't already _very_ familiar with Linux system > administration. I took the tests to see just how well I really did know the > subject, and to be honest, I was sweating at some points. (Well-learned > test-taking skills from college helped out in a number of cases.)
Oddly, I don't think it's a very good book. It is helpful in studying for the exam, but a number of its examples are Just Plain Wrong, and it seems to specialize in funky little command-line tools that no one uses. To be fair, so does the test. (My favorite question, because I should have known it and didn't, was how you got "ps" to show you some particular bit of info. I can tell you it's *one* of the four flags "ugax" but I couldn't tell you *which* of them. They were, of course, my four choices.) If you need to pass LPIC Level 1, buy the book. If you want to become a good Unix/Linux sysadmin, you can do better. If you need a good book about system administration, Evi Nemeth's _Unix System Administration Handbook_ is still the best anywhere. Tom Limoncelli and Christine Hogan's _The Practice of System and Network Administration_ is also first rate, and Frisch's O'Reilly book _Essential System Administration_ is excellent too. All of them are far superior to _LPI in a Nutshell_, in my opinion. Adam
