I’ve worked almost exclusively with Windows machines for the past years. However, this is changing rapidly (by circumstance, mostly) at the moment. So the time was never better to start a deep dive into Linux.
As you can see from my past Study Plans, I’m a big fan of “breadth-first” learning. I’ll go into a focused, meticulous, relentless grind starting at the very beginning. I plan to do the same for my Linux studies.
Certification Downsides
I will mention two major problems with certifications though:
- The certificates are near to worthless.
Cheating your way through is commonplace, especially at companies that care only about being able to charge more for an employee because they’re certified. The only “worth” of a certificate lies in the fact that it reminds you that you’ve passed it fair and square. - They tend to test a lot of silly or unimportant knowledge.
Experts will tell you that many things you need to know to pass an exam are things they will in reality actually have to look up. Knowing whether method so and so returns an INT or BIGINT is useless, in real scenarios you’ll have an IDE or documentation to tell you this.
But for me striving to pass an exam is worth it nonetheless. Following exam objectives closely gives me confidence that I’ve got a solid basis, and frees me of having to spend any mental-cpu-time on monitoring that. I want to cover as close to 100% of the important topics as possible, and I guess covering 130% worth of material is one way of doing that.
Here’s a visualization of what I mean:
The blue area covers the green area for the most part, and it takes zero time to use it as a study guide. The red area is a plan I would probably create myself composing it from various resources. But creating it would cost me many hours, and is more likely to leave serious gaps.
So I’ve decided that going with exam objectives as a guide is a sane choice for me.
The Actual Plan
So how about the actual plan? Isn’t that basically the objectives from the website then? Well: yes and no. I also like to publicly share my plan, for two reasons:
- The main reason: it gives me confidence I’ve got a solid plan.
- Secondary reason: others might find it useful.
In addition, as a side effect, I guess it motivates me: feeling that “others” are watching my progress makes me want to complete everything. Regardless of whether there are such “others”.
This time around I tried something different from the previous Study Guides. I’ve used Trello to catch the study plan. You can check out the public board yourself. Here’s a screenshot:
Personalizing The Plan
Finally, you can easily copy this board and use it as a starting point for your own studies. This is quite easy to do:
It’s exactly what I have done, and you can follow my progress on Trello.
And now that I’ve told you about this, dear reader, I will have to complete my studies…