I am currently enrolled in community college pursuing a AAS in Linux Sys Admin.
The pros and cons of my current Linux class – four weeks in:
- The professor is very passionate (YAY!)
- He doesn’t take breaks (BOO!)
- He doesn’t mind if you do though (YAY!)
- The class is 6 -10pm (BOO!)
- The traffic is crazy and parking is wack (BOO!)
- Other students in the class are really nice (YAY! and YAY!)
We do most things in the console provided through a separate company and not the college. This means that I can log in from home and do homework and labs and see all that progress when I login at school. School machines are routinely wiped. I was pretty torqued when my VM was no where to be found the 2nd week of class!
Our testing has been lightweight so far and most of it is stuff I know already. It turns out I have a really high recall of old MS-DOS; which is not the same as LINUX commands but the quite similar. I make a lot of comparative connections between the two. It also helps that I have experience with command line in several other contexts (Putty and mySQL). Unfortunately, unless you pay extra or work in the field, modern web hosts don’t generally give you console access. So those experiences aren’t as broad or deep as I would like.
Finally, I am a programmer. Learning new syntax is pretty easy. Application of programming logic is where the difficulty lies. I am glad I taught myself OOP and even MVC modalities. At this point I don’t think they are useful in LINUX. But I have a suspicion those ways of thinking about coding will come in handy.
And yes. I have an A in the class.
I am still brushing up on JavaScript. I think this is my weakest skill set. Though if I do take the admin certifications, JavaScript will be a non-issue.
One fun fact that had me chuckling – there is a little controversy in the LINUX community. Linux itself is not sufficient to run a machine. It needs other tools to help it. Most distributions of the Linux includes some or all of GNU tools. So when we run Linux it is really Linux with GNU and should be labelled as such giving GNU its props as it were. BUT NO. Most users just call it Linux. LOL. This causes hard feelings among some groups.