Reader reviews SuSE Linux courses

We’ve been talking about training a fair bit recently, but mostly it’s been about which courses are offered where and at what price. Novell’s “Bridging NetWare skills to Novell Open Enterprise Server for Linux”, for example, is a free online session. You might think it’s only worth what you pay for it, but the time you invest in it is also a form of payment and it could keep you from having the experience one reader did with the more Linux-oriented courses that will actually cost you money.

Last year this reader took a series of SuSE courses:

* SuSE Linux Fundamentals (Course 3036)

* SuSE Linux Administration (Course 3037)

* Advanced SuSE Linux Administration (Course 3038)

* Novell Nterprise Linux Services (Course 3015)

The Fundamentals course is self-study, so not reviewed here. But this reader (who I won’t name but who has never been anything but scrupulously honest before) did review the other three from the standpoint of a longtime NetWare administrator with little or no Linux experience. Here are excerpts from the reviews:

“The 3037 course we did over four days (fast track), which is an impossible task, because there is just way too much material to cover in only four days. Remember that all these concepts are new to most CNEs. I have been lucky to play with FreeBSD and other Linux distro’s, so have a fair idea of what makes Linux tick, but my other colleagues on the course lost interest by the third day, as there was just too much material to cover in such a short period.”

“Course 3038 – The Advanced Admin course was better, but lacked depth with regard to the scripting side of things. I mean, here I was faced with doing shell scripting (that I have never done before). I will not be confident enough in doing the practicum, because I have no clue how or even where to start putting a script together. I’m also not the only one; my colleagues feel the same way. I do not do shell scripting as a daily task and I will have to learn this skill. So we are all now motivated to attend the Advanced Shell Scripting course that our training company is offering and then prepare to attempt the practicum.

“Course 3015 – the NNLS course was disappointing in that everything was still based on [SuSE Linux Enterprise Server] 8 [SLES 10 is due out in a couple of months] and trying to do the exercises resulted in some very weird errors. Also, after downgrading some of the PCs in the class to SLES 8, we still had issues in even getting Red Carpet [Red Carpet provides centralized and automated management and maintenance of Linux systems] to run correctly. I must say the trainer did his utmost, but could not get it to work. And the trainer was a man of many years of *nix experience.”

The conclusion this reader draws is that without prior experience in basic Linux administration, you would be lost in these Linux courses. Just one more reason to do the online, free “NetWare to OES” course so that, if nothing else, will at least leave you familiar with the terminology.