Having taught courses, I'd say that you could find them useful, especially if you have a good instructor. The course should give you some directed hands-on experience with a live system, teach you some stuff you hadn't considered and hopefully even disabuse you of some bad practices.
On the other hand, do NOT presume that the course will turn you into an overnight guru. Time energy and, as someone else pointed out, "Just Playing Around" are what you need for something like that.
Some suggestions: 1: get yourself a machine (home or work) that you can play with. It doesn't have to be an expensive new box. An old P3/500 with a 10Meg hard drive is a fine start. If you want to play with networking get a couple more .. A couple of P2s with 64 meg of ram will do OK. With that and a KVM switch, you're ready to play.
If you get the hardware second hand (or out of an old store room), it'll probably be a good bit less expensive than the course, and will give you a leg up during the course and after (before, even).
man man is your friend
Eve Atley wrote:
I'd like to get opinions on possibly taking a linux/unix course. We run a Red Hat 9 linux server in a small business, and I come from a primarily windows environment (though I do use a little Unix on Mac OS X). I was debating taking a unix/linux course at a local community college. We also own "Red Hat Linux Networking and System Administration", but obviously I need the time to read this book. I don't have the luxury of playing with our server to learn and get hands-on feel.
So based on this course description...is it worth it? How in-depth do community college courses of this nature go? Is there another, perhaps better way to go about learning what I need to know?
CIT-220 Unix Operating System ------------------------------ Section AW60 R 06:15PM-09:20PM (3 credits) Dates: 01/26/04 - 05/01/04 Prerequisite(s): PREREQUISITES: CIT111, CIT115 This course introduces students to the UNIX and LINUX operating systems. Lecture and classroom labs using a UNIX/LINUX operating system environment cover the following topics: internal design concepts, command line interface, text editing, shell scripting, and file maintenance tools. Additional topics include tools and facilities used in administering a small network including user account management, file system permissions, printer management, system monitoring, backup/restore of files, and other administrative tools.
Thanks, Eve
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