Are the O'Reilly / Useractive Courses Any Good?

IronBlade asks: "Hi all, I'm very interested to hear if the O'Reilly / Useractive Linux/UNIX System Administrator courses are any good. There are 4 units, and as they are offering them in a package (4 for the price of 3) until -Feb 15th-, I'm very interested in your opinion as to their worth. I have previous sysadmin experience on GNU/Linux and feel I have a reasonable grasp of things, but I don't have any proof of my skills, and certificates from the University of Illinois would be a Good Thing to add to the CV."

University of Illinois

[eyempack]

From my limited time working in HR i suggest one thing before you seek on line courses. One of the weakness of on line courses is the further away they are from your current or possible residences less credence they regard it with. I do not know of this course in particular but thats my feeling with a lot of on line courses.

Can I make a deal here?

[XiC]

If I say "yes" can I order some books for free?

I will let you know as soon as I get an answer from those O'Reilly guys..

expensive

[slobbargoat]

Thats well expensive though...

Doesn't anyone know of cheaper online courses elsewhere?

Not UIC... UIUC

[HuggybearVT]

It's not Illinois-Chicago (UIC), it's just Illinois. That's the main campus in Urbana-Champaign. (UIUC) http://www.uiuc.edu [uiuc.edu]

Re:Not UIC... UIUC

[IronBlade]

It's not Illinois-Chicago (UIC), it's just Illinois. That's the main campus in Urbana-Champaign. (UIUC) http://www.uiuc.edu

Oooops!
Not too familiar with US universities...

Developer Works LPI Cert Tutorials

[blazerw11]

IBM's Developer Works has a number of Tutorials [ibm.com] covering Linux. A number of these are designed to get you prepared for the LPI Certifications.

They're written by Daniel Robbins of Gentoo fame and are quite good.

Finally, you'll have to register, sign away first born...

Re:Developer Works LPI Cert Tutorials

[IronBlade]

Thanks for this.
I've been reading through some of them, and even though I'm pretty familiar with the basics, I'm still picking up little things here and there.
I'm looking forward to going into them in more depth, and learning new things.
So, mainly due to the costs involved (US$1,200 vs ~US$400), I will focus on LPI, rather than the O'Reilly/Useractive offerings.

Taking the courses right now

[JHromadka]

I'm taking the courses right now. I've completed Linux I and am on Linux II: Networking & DNS. What I like about the course is that there is an actual RH 7.3 machine that you can ssh into (or use the web interface if you like) and you can mess around on it. Kerry, my instructor, is very good about quickly grading quizes and responding to questions by the next day.

You do get some free books, but they are not meant to be used in the course directly. I got Unix in a Nutshell about 2 months after I started Linux I.

I'm taking the courses because I want to get into Linux admin, learn a little more about what's going on under the hood of Mac OS X, and to make myself more marketable.

BTW, Safari 1.2 doesn't seem to like the website very much (logging in just returns to the logon page), so I use Mozilla for the website and Terminal.app for working.

UIUC is a top school

[love2hateMS]

UIUC is a great Computer Science school. I would be quite surprised if they would put their name on something that lacked quality.