Customer Reviews

LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The first thing I want to say about reading this book is : I passed! Certification books serve four purposes: first, they serve as a way to prepare for computerized certification exams. Second, they provide a training plan for learning the objectives in the certification. Third, can a book explain system administration concepts while limiting a readers exposure to difficult, elusive topics until later? Fourth, can a book like this still be useful post-certification?

Part One (covering the 101 test) contained generous amounts of examples for text-processing commands and a really top notch discussion of permissions, ownership, booting and documentation. Helpfully, need to know boxes are scattered throughout the book to indicate how important a topic is on the test. Frequently, the author will point out that although he explained a certain topic in depth, it wont be covered in depth on the test. I really appreciated that, although I found that the actual test covered certain topics (such as X Windows) in much more depth than Dean leads us to believe. One thing, by the way, to remember, is that often the book gives only the 5 or 6 most popular switches for each command. If you learned about these commands only from this book, you might be overlooking some important switches. I found this especially to be true when Dean discussed user management. I consider usermod g and usermod G to be really important commands, but this book didnt even mention them. On the other hand, Dean gave an explanation of regular expressions which was quite adequate for the purposes of this book. Although omitting some switches proved exasperating at times, the simplified view of the commands can be helpful for linux newbies.

Part Two (covering 102 test) covered a lot more ground: Apache, sendmail, nfs, dns, tcp-ip; heck, books have been written on each of those topics. The book covered well these topics in particular: compiling a kernel, troubleshooting tcp-ip and using rpms. I found his discussion of Debian package management to be hard to follow, although that may be because Ive never used it before in real life (but watch out! The test covers this in depth!). The books discussion of network services (nfs, sendmail, apache, samba) was shallow at best, but I doubt anyone would rely on such a book for maintaining a web server, for example. But it provided some of the basics at least. The section on X Window was succinct and helpful. Also, some of the information presented is outdated, at least on Red Hats latest distribution. Red Hat, for example, no longer uses inetd for startup, and some of the directory paths have since changed. These are minor quibbles, and one of the challenge of passing a certification like this is asking yourself: should I be learning things for the exam that are no longer accurate or relevant in current distributions? Certifications test the knowledge available at the time of test creation, when in reality new applications are being added and processes streamlined every day.

The book contains lots of sample multiple choice items, review questions and exercises. The multiple choice items didnt really add much to the book, but I frequently referred to the review questions. (Remember, the LPI exam has fill-in-the-blanks questions). Dont overlook the excellent highlighters index at the back of the book.

Two minor quibbles. First, the cover is not very strong and is bent, torn and curled over. The other is that the LPI exam objectives are not located at the front or back of the book. Rather, the table of objectives for 101 are in the front, and objectives for 102 are in the middle. I referred to this table constantly to see the amount of weight LPI was giving to a particular topic. Also, because the table of contents follow the LPI learning objectives (probably a smart thing), it is often difficult to find documentation about a certain command. For that I might recommend Linux in a Nutshell , 3rd Edition, which serves as a comprehensive index of commands and system utilities. It is excellent. Also, General Linux I Exam Prep (Exam: 101) by Dee Ann LeBlanc (published in 2000), is an extremely helpful book (and available for significantly reduced price used). Although it was one of the first to market and didnt address the LPI objectives explicitly, the exercises and presentation of material are every bit as good as Deans book. Keep in mind also that LPI Linux Certification is not sufficient in and of itself. You will probably end up referring to other books such as Matt Welshs Running Linux, Olaf Kirchs Linux Network Administrator's Guide or the unbelievably good Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition .

This is an excellent book, very comprehensive. Organized by subject matter. The explanations are very clear and easy to understand. The writing style is easy to follow and direct without being too cutsey or annoying. I will say there are a number of shortcomings that will hopefully be fixed in edition 2. 1. Not enough practice problems (there is just 1 practice exam for each one exam) 2. Sometimes they screw up the topics. For instance, there is a whole mess of stuff on shell scripting in the "LPI101" section; yet the LPI website says that shell scripting is in part 2. 3. There are a few typos.

I will say that after having taken LPI 101, but not 102, and passed, that there are some holes in the book. For instance, (and this is not a real example) the book may tell you about "ls" and "ls -l" and "ls -a" but the test may ask about "ls -c" or "ls --sort=size" or something. So there are some holes in the book! You have to be careful. But OVERALL it's a good book, if you learn everything in the book you will pass. Just don't expect that it will give you the keys to the test.

I'm happy with this book. I'd been running Linux in an academic environment for several years, so I had a bit of a head start before reading this book. I took the first LPI Level 1 exam this afternoon, and passed with about 45 minutes to spare. As a professional AIX and Linux consultant, I was surprised to have acquired new knowledge from reading this book. However, I did encounter a few questions on the exam that weren't covered in the book, as well as a few tricky (or maybe just ambiguously/poorly written) questions that required multiple rereads. Despite being the first of the lowest level of LPI certification, this exam became surprisingly difficult during the last third of the questions (I don't think this is an adaptive test). I've taken Microsoft, IBM, and Sun certification exams, and this test ranks among the tougher ones. That's good, in my opinion, because it sorts out the knowledgeable people from, ahem, the others. I strongly advise you to read O'Reilly's Running Linux in addition to this book before attempting the exam. I hope O'Reilly plans a similar book for LPI Levels 2 and 3.

I am preparing for the LPI level one test and picked up this guide as a study reference. Overall, the quality of this book is outstanding and the material is presented in way that made it very easy to digest. I've broken the highlights down into three categories.

1. Good - Excellent explanation of the topics in the books. There were very few items I had to go to other sources from. The way this book is set up makes it great as a study guide or for future reference. Even if I wasn't going to take the test, I'd still keep this one within arms reach.

2. Bad - LPI has restructured their tests. This means that some of the 102 test topics are now in the 101 test. Make sure you get the correct list of study topics directly from LPI to ensure you are preparing for the correct subjects. Since these changes were made quite a while ago, I would have hoped that O'Reilly would have come up with a new version, but no luck.

3. UGLY - Several topics were not covered at all in the book. This is really dissapointing for me as I've always respected the O'Reilly books and found them to be way above par. But don't take my word for it. You can locate the missing parts by comparing the T-O-C and the LPI site

Overall, this is a great book. If you are currently a system administrator or work with Linux often, this matierial should be easy to pick up and understand. The book has in depth coverage along with a "Highlighters Index" for quick reviews and sample tests to help you prepare.<...

I purchased "LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell" because I have had several other Nutshell books which were very good. This one is no exception, it is well written and easy to read. There is thoughtful use of examples and code snippits to illustrate points, and there are practice excercises and exams which are good. So far, it has taught me things about Linux I did not know even though I have been administering my own linux system for over 2 years.

Despite this, there are more mistakes in the first printing(Jun 2001) than I would like. The mistakes aren't just typos either, there are some quite subtle errors in both the examples and the descriptions of command options. There are also errors in the figures, with one figure missing completely(it is available on the oreilly.com website), and another printed twice with different figure numbers. It would be a good idea to visit oreilly.com and find the erratum. There are both confirmed and unconfirmed errors. Most of the unconfirmed errors are valid, but I would advise caution.

This is the kind of book you that is best read in front of a computer running linux so that you can try it all out. If you do this you will pick up the mistakes anyway. I think the book achieves its purpose, and is a good study guide.

This 500 page book covers the topics contained on the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) certification tests. LPI has three levels of certification - LPIC1 or Junior Level Administration, LPIC2 or Intermediate Level Administration, and LPIC3 or Senior Level Administration. Currently LPIC3 is still under development. At the time this book was published (June 2001) LPIC2 was still under development and LPIC1 had been in use for 6 months. This book only covers the level 1 certification so the title should probably be changed to reflect that in the next edition since LPIC2 is now out.

I really liked this book. My experience with Linux started with RedHat 5, but until recently it has always been more of a hobby activity than work related. As such I tended to poke around in areas of interest or necessity rather than explore all the subsystems within Linux. In this way I ended up knowing some things about configuring Linux networking, but absolutely nothing about setting up custom kernels or printing just because I never had a need or desire to do that. This book was great for walking you through each of the Linux topic areas and giving you a solid grounding in how the subsystem works, the relevant configuration files, and what to expect on the exam for each topic. When you are experimenting with something like turning on user and group disk quotas for the first time it is very helpful to have a step by step explanation of what to do and why you are doing it. That type of information is sometime hard to get from the man pages.

The book itself closely follows the LPIC1 exam structure. LPIC1 consists of two tests (101 and 102) with about 60 questions each. The topics covered in each test are numbered using a "level.topic" notation such as 1.5 or 2.4 for topic 5 on test 101 and topic 4 on test 102 respectively. The book itself has two parts - part one covering exam 101 and part 2 covering exam 102. Each part has 6 sections. The first section is an exam overview which outlines the topics on that exam and the number of objectives for each topic with a description of what the topic is about. Section two is a study guide with a more detailed breakdown of each topic and objective with the weight of each objective has on the exam. An example of a topic and an objective are "Administrative tools" and "Maintain an effective data backup strategy" respectively. These tables supposedly can help you prioritize which objectives to focus on, but I found that there were so many objectives (~60 for exam 101) with the majority of weights between 3 and 5, that it was only occasionally useful to see if the objective was weight 1 (minimum) versus 7 (maximum) when deciding how much time to spend on an objective. The third section is the meat of the book with a chapter on each topic and lots of details about each objective. I found this well written and easy to follow and understand. There are lots of examples to help explain commands and concepts, and some areas end up being a mini reference for a utility or command with just the most common options. I found it best if I read these chapters away from the computer then went back and sat at a Linux console to experiment with the things which were new to me until I understood it. After the chapters on the topics, the next section is review questions and exercises where you get a chance test your knowledge and reread the stuff you missed. The exercises require a live Linux system to run shell commands and scripts and reinforce the material covered. A play system where you can repartition disks and regenerate the kernel is highly recommended. Once you are done reviewing, there is a sample LPI exam and if you pass it (70%) you probably have a pretty good grasp of the material in the book. The last section is called "Highlighter's Index". It is like a Coles notes version of the material. This is a great way to refresh you memory after you have been away from the material for a while or just before you write the exam.

So what's wrong with the book? Well for starters it has become a little dated. LPI has changed the tests over the past three years moving topic areas from one test to another so the organization of the book no longer follows the current exam topics. LPI has left the topic numbers consistent however so matching up current exam content to chapters in the book isn't that hard. It sounds like LPI does this on a regular basis since the books topics were already shuffled to agree with the exams as of June 2001. Since I planned to write both 101 and 102 at the same time it didn't really matter to me, but for someone studying for one or the other, it means the practice exams are no longer as relevant. To give you an idea of the changes, here is the current exam content compared to the book organization:

As of August 2004:

LPI 101 exam topics (book placement)
* Hardware & Architecture (Part 2 - exam 102)
* Linux Installation & Package Management (Part 2 - exam 102)
* GNU & Unix commands (Part 1 - exam 101)
* Devices, Linux Filesystems, Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (Part 1 - exam 101)
* The X Window System (Part 2 - exam 102)

102 topics:
* Kernel (Part 2 - exam 102)
* Boot, Initialization, Shutdown and Runlevels (Part 1 - exam 101)
* Printing (Part 2 - exam 102)
* Documentation (Part 1 - exam 101)
* Shells, Scripting, Programming, and Compiling (Part 2 - exam 102)
* Administrative Tasks (Part 1 - exam 101)
* Networking Fundamentals (Part 2 - exam 102)
* Networking Services (Part 2 - exam 102)
* Security (Part 2 - exam 102)

I found very few mistakes in the book itself. There was a missing diagram in the printing section, a missing line continuation character in one of the example configuration files, and a dyslectic reference to exam 201 when they meant 102, but other than that the sample code was accurate and the examples worked. Being three years old means that you won't find much on the latest innovations in Linux but then again this is a foundation type exam where much of the material is timeless.



So, how well does it prepare you to write the LPI certification exams? The book is an excellent starting point but you will need to use other materials as well to fill in areas that can be asked on the exams. Plan on using the man pages to go beyond what is in the book, and plan on referring to the LPI website to see what is currently included in each topic area since this does change. For example, in the book the "Security" topic does not mention ipchains or iptables which are now part of the material included in the 102 exam. I just wrote both the 101 and 102 exams on August 28th and this book plus other resources were used to prepare. I estimate that the book covers 85-90% of the current exam contents so it is highly recommended as long as you recognize the limitations and don't use it as your sole preparation guide. Since I wrote the paper version of the exams I won't know whether I passed on not for another 4-6 weeks, but I suspect that without the book my chances would have been a lot lower.

In summary, this book is very worthwhile for anyone preparing to take LPI level 1 certification, but it is a little out of date so be forewarned to cross check it's contents with the current LPI exams, especially if you are only writing one. I find it an excellent general reference book as well for those times when you have to jump into an area that you kinda know but have probably forgotten enough that a quick review is in order before diving in. I'd give this a 4.5 or higher if it was more current, but it sounds like the LPI exams themselves are a moving target.

September 2004

This exhaustive book of over 900 pages is one of the best organized and on-point books available for studying for the LPI Linux Certification. Beyond that it is a fantastic desktop reference guide that is easy to use and gets right to the point if you are trying to look up how to do something or use a command. This is not a book for the average peson to try to learn how to use Linux. It is nearly void or any simplistic information on how to use a graphical interface or similar information that you find in most books. Instead it is full of the detail information a system administrator needs to know.

The layout of the book is pretty much along the lines of the individual exam modules with each objective clearly explained and followed by detailed information on the subject. Each major section is followed by review questions, exercises, a practice exam and a great study outline section called a Highlighter's Index.

LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell is highly recommended to anyone who is already familiar with Linux and wants to pursue certification or have an excellent quick reference handy for personal use.

Just came back after becoming an LPIC. I have tried all the books out there on the subject. It s sad that this is the only good book available on LPI 2. The author is undoubtedly very strong in Linux and is very knowledgeable. In fact I found this book very helpful in explaining many topics which other general Linux books overlook. Dont be fooled by one book covering part 101 and part 102. Topics are coverd in depth.

I purchased this book for preparing LPIC exams and then passed the exams. But I found out that from the official LPI website (www.lpi.org), it lists all the detailed objectives for the exams. Which are more updated than this book. Basically you only need to have one comprehensive Linux book and then follow all the objectives to prepare the exams. By doing that, it should be no problem to pass. By the way, LPI just upated its objectives which will be effective by April, 2009. So I expected new version of this book will come out very soon...

I've done a few reviews for O'reilly and they have all been good, and this
one is no different. This book covers just about everything a Linux power
user may ever need , which is exactly what you need to pass the LPI 101/102
tests. The book starts out slow and builds on the fundamentals, until in the
second section you hit some advanced topics. The test's are basically all
about remembering command "formulas", basic system information, and how to
perform basic to intermediate task's. This book makes sure you will be able
to pass the test with ease. If you can study and memorize information you
can pass this exam, and with the help of O'reilly once again it wont even be
a challenge.

The book covers broad topics ranging from how to pipe commands and
un-packing tar files to basic sendmail setup and system maintenance. It also
covers install, and boot loaders which is defiantly a must, and because of
this the book is much more than just a study tool. Linux beginners could
benefit hugely from this book as it contains everything they will need to
get started. Need to know how to us the vi editor ? The books got it. Need
to know where those pesky log files are ? The books got it. Did you just get
broadband and Linux and are just itching to start your own website ? O'
reilly has you covered again. This book is just an all around great read. If
they should ever come out with a book covering the other LPI exams you can
bet that I'll be pre-ordering it.

F. Hines

San Antonio Macromedia & ColdFusion User Group