LPIC-1 Exam 101 Study Plan

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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:

Venn diagram of Study Plan Coverage
Venn diagram of Study Plan Coverage

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:

  1. The main reason: it gives me confidence I’ve got a solid plan.
  2. 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:

LPIC-1 101 Study Guide Trello Board
LPIC-1 101 Study Guide Trello Board

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:

Copy Trello Board
Copy Trello Board

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…

70-480 (HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3) Study Plan

Looking for my exam summary? Jump straight to it! Want to know more? Keep reading…

Last year I published my study plan for the 70-513 Microsoft exam (“study log” would’ve been more appropriate), which helped me pass the exam (without cheating by using brain dumps) with just under 200 hours of study time. This time I’m going for the 70-480 exam (html5, JavaScript, and css3), and I’ve decided to use an actual plan. When I started rolling up this plan, there were a few premises.

First up: the date for my exam is already set. I will probably not be able to spend a full 200 hours on the subject matter before planning my exam. The plan will have to scale with the amount of time I will turn out to have available. Anyways, given that the exam was free of charge, it’s not as big a deal if I don’t pass it.

Secondly, the subject matter for 70-480 is not entirely new to me, as was the case with the 70-513 (WCF) exam. So, my plan would be okay even if it omits more general prose about the subjects and sticks to the details of objectives. I’m not sure how this will affect my chances. I’m hoping my existing knowledge make things easier, but at the same time I’m afraid that it won’t…

Finally, and most imporantly, I figured that reviewing the exam objectives very carefully should be enoughBecause the exam is brand new, there is no official study guide, nor are there any books specifically aimed at the exam. I was hoping to piggyback on someone else’s summary, but given that I couldn’t find any decent one, I decided to create my own.

The Plan

So here are the steps I’m taking to study for this exam:

  1. Create an overview of all exam objectives.
  2. Find links for all objectives (at least one, preferably two or more per objective), from various sources:
    1. The relevant spec.
    2. The W3 wiki, if applicable.
    3. MDN (my personal favorite source for most web development topics).
    4. MSDN (it’s a Microsoft exam, after all).
    5. jQuery (Microsoft’s gambling hard on this library, it seems).
    6. Miscellaneous other sources (DiveIntoHtml5, Stack Overflow, etc)
  3. Review all objectives by reading through the linked pages.

So far I’m pretty happy with the result. If you want to piggyback on my 70-480 summary: be my guest! It looks something like this:

70-480 Study Guide

Creating the list and digging up all the links took a few nights work, all done over the course of the previous two weeks. Next up: two weeks of reviewing these objectives, followed by the exam itself.

Wish me luck!

MCTS 70-513 (WCF) Study Plan (part 2 of 2)

This is part 2 in a series on the MCTS 70-513 exam. The first part is an introduction, the second part describes the study plan I followed to complete the exam.

There were two questions I wanted answered when I set out to study for the exam:

  1. How much time is reasonably needed to pass the exam?
  2. What materials are recommended and/or needed to pass the exam?

The first question was impossible to answer or to find an answer to. The second one was a bit easier, even though I had to filter the many suggestions to use Braindumps. Here is my answer to both.

Overview

Let’s kick off with an overview of the materials used, and provide an answer to question one:

Material Hours spent
MSDN Getting Started With WCF Tutorial 2
Book: Programming WCF services, 3rd Edition 35
Book: Windows Communication Foundation 4 Step by Step 47
Book: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5- WCF Self-paced Training Kit 34
Stack Overflow: Reading and answering questions on [WCF] 30
Memorizing web.config’s system.serviceModel section 6
Reviewing All 70-513 Exam Objectives 36
Grand Total 190

If you’re going to create a study plan for yourself based on this, you should note the following:

  • These are pure study hours; breaks and such are not included.
  • This is what worked for me; no warranty given or implied!
  • I spent these hours mostly in the order above.
  • Before these hours I had zero experience with WCF, a wee bit experience with ASMX services, and quite a bit of experience with ASP.NET.

The great thing about these 200- hours: this is approximately what I estimated up front I’d need to get a passing grade.

Materials Used

Here are some miscellaneous details about the abovementioned materials.

Programming WCF ServicesProgramming WCF services, 3rd edition

This book by Juval Löwy is widely considered the most in-depth book about WCF. It explicitly focuses on the things the author deems important, leaving out (or just barely mentioning) the esoteric or “useless” bits of WCF. When studying for something I prefer to get in over my head, and slowly fill in the gaps. If you prefer to build up your knowledge steadily instead of doing a deep-dive: save this book for last.

Windows Communication Foundation Step-by-StepWindows Communication Foundation 4, Step by Step

This book was probably the worst but most complete tour you could get for WCF. It takes you along most of the features with practical excercises, but is horrible in explaining things (even mis-informing at times). The worst part about this tour is the fact that you have to follow the tour guide to the letter, otherwise you’ll get lost without any clue how to get back on track. Glad I read the other book first, which allowed me to understand what this tour guide was showing me.

WCF Training KitWCF 3.5 Self-paced Training Kit

There is no .NET 4 version of the WCF training kit (makes you wonder how invested Microsoft is in this technology, huh?). Instead, most fora recommend just grabbing the 3.5 version. This book is very decent, has topics chopped into nice small chunks, offering a mix of theory, exercises, and training questions. It also was very complementary to the book by Juval Löwy.

Stack Overflow

Answering questions on the various Stack Exchange sites is one of my current hobbies. It made sense to practice and test my WCF knowledge by answering questions, and I can highly recommend it as a form of study! It was based on the slogan: “If you want to get good at something, start teaching it!“. Words of wisdom.

Memorizing <system.serviceModel>

Okay, maybe not one of the brightest ideas I had. It did act as a general review of WCF, but in the end it didn’t feel worth it. I suggest you spend your time on something else.

Reviewing the Exam Objectives

This was crucial to passing the exam. I printed all the objectives, and went through each letter of it, making sure I knew exactly what each and every item was about. I reviewed every topic by at least looking it up in one of the books I had, and often enough I also went on to read more about it on MSDN. This exercise was useful not in the least because there were some objectives on the list that weren’t even mentioned in any of the books.

In Conclusion

There’s a lot about the 70-513 exam that understandably lures folks to using those brain dumps. The most important things to mention:

  • WCF is a vast topic, boring in many aspects. Given that you’ll only use a small subset of WCF.
  • Questions on the exam are horrible, with things like “In which namespace does class X reside?“.
  • The exam on itself tests factual knowledge and not in the slightest practical proficiency.

Yet still I’m glad I finished and passed without resorting to “cheating”. The above study plan is what did the trick for me. Maybe it’ll help someone else too.

MCTS 70-513 (WCF) Study Plan (part 1 of 2)

This is part 1 in a series on the MCTS 70-513 exam. The first part is an introduction, the second part describes the study plan I followed to complete the exam.

A few months ago I started studying for the MCTS 70-513 exam on Microsoft WCF (web services). Before I started I had already heard of a phenomenon I knew under the name “TestKing”: test-questions to prep you for the actual exam. As I found out, “TestKing” is just one of the more well-known Brain Dump providers: cheat sheets with just about all the possible questions you may get on your actual exam.

Microsoft Learning logo Turns out a lot of people use these prep sets, usually as a companion to quite a bit of study time. They ginormously improve your chances of passing the exam, partially because they shield you from (amongst others) the utterly worthless type of question: “In which namespace does BadAssClassXyz live?”. In fact, it seems you can pass an exam with nothing else but about 20 hours of cramming those brain dumps.

Early on, I decided I would try to get the certification without using brain dumps.

Okay, glad I got that decision out of the way. Time to make a plan of attack, time to find out how much study time would be needed to pass the exam without resorting to cheating. So I hit up a typical Google query, but that turned up nothing. Following that I searched Programmers.SE, finding only this meagre question which just links to companies providing test exams or brain dumps. In the end, the only thing remotely useful was a blog post I didn’t find until one week before my exam date: this overview of MSDN links for reviewing the exam objectives.

Turns out, nobody knows, or at least nobody has posted online how much time studying for MCTS exams typically takes. Is it 40 hours? Maybe 150 hours? Or even a 1000 hours? Sure, the answer will always be “it depends” to some degree, but if only someone had posted how much time it took him/her this could help get a general idea.

So I decided to diligently keep track of my study hours, and publish them on my blog once I had passed my exam. By now I’m the proud owner of an MCTS 70-513 certificate. So stay tuned for part 2 in this series, where I’ll post the study plan actuals that turned out to be good enough for me.

Read on for part 2, detailing the study plan.