How much time will it take to prepare for the RHCSA exam

 rhce course duration Hey everyone! in this post I will give you the technique you can use to prepare for the RHCSA (Red Hat Certified System Administrator) exam and pass with a good score..This might be a long post, because I am going to share with you my whole experience and every single piece of information I can remember. I will be using a question/answer structure mostly in this post so its easier to follow..

How much time will it take to prepare for the RHCSA exam?

I am coming from a software development background,and I basically started using Linux in my day to day tasks 18 months ago after I joined my new company and I passed with a score of 283/300 after one and a half months of preparation. so I would say you can easily prepare for the exam in 2 months with a rate of 2-3 hours of practice a day, more or less depends on how much time and effort you put and also your previous experience in Red Hat and Linux..

Why a certificate?

1- For me as a software developer I believe its good to have the knowledge with operating systems. its where your software eventually will be deployed 

2- Certificates more often gives you the opportunity to explore the main basic topics, because if you check the objectives of the exam, its quite comprehensive and teaches you the main basic stuff to a good extent..

3- Finally it can validate your knowledge in the job market and perhaps help you to get your future/dream job.

IMPORTANT, certificate doesn't replace experience, but rather it helps accelerate your learning by covering the basics, so don't just rely on a certificate on getting you the job but get yourself exposed, get experience and in addition to the certificate you will get the full picture.

What book did I study from?

The rapid track Red Hat book, which is not available online as a soft-copy and you can only get a hard copy if you joined their official training.. but there are other books and websites that I will mention later in this post that can help you achieve your goal and pass the exam.

General information about the exam:

The exam is a practical exam, you will be using a real machine to achieve the objectives of the questions and your answer will be evaluated based on the end goal and not on the 'How'.

For example, if you are asked to create a new static connection with the IP address 192.25.2.4, it doesn't really matter weather you use the nmcli from the command line or from the GUI tools available, if you configured it using either ways, you will get the marks for that, based on the end goal.

Finally the exam duration is 2.5 hours.

Is 2.5 hours enough to finish the exam?

Well obviously its, and it should. I finished my exam in 1.5 hours and I spent the remaining time rechecking my answers.

The way to achieve that is to practice, practice a lot and to be completely be comfortable using the command line. the last days prior to the exam I just practice random things from the top of my head on my virtual machine, I just start them and start changing the root password, set a Yum repository , auto-mount to NFS, create a new connection, after you do that a few times you find yourself extremely fast and everything just feels smooth.

Another thing that helped me with the timing is to memorize the commands that you use frequently as that will help to save sometime, for sure you can use the man commands to get some help, but using man in every single question is not going to help you that much, so you better have a good balance and memorize all the commands and at the same time know how to use the man commands in case you forgot.

Did you use videos? websites?

I mostly used the rapid track book which is the official Red Hat book, but for all the new concepts that I have no prior knowledge to, I do a simple YouTube video search and I watch the videos to understand the concept. I did not follow a specific channel or playlist but this guy (The Linux Man) was my favorite, he produces high quality videos in which he simplifies things and explain them in a clear way. sadly he doesn't cover all the RHCSA topics but the topics he covers are simply awesome. check him out 

Moving to websites! Certdepot is my favorite website for getting different tips and to cover most of the RHCSA objectives in a simple way, also you can find how to set up the server side in the tasks that require client-server.