New Goal: BS IT-Security at WGU.

[Thorne]

Congrats on the passes! From experience, I can say the ICND2 should be more fun if you like the hands-on side of things.

I'm floundering a bit, too. I've got 3 classes left and 4 months to do 'em, but the Linux+ is not my friend right now. After 8 days, I'm done with 3 out of 5 chapters, and have yet to take any of the practice tests. :/

I may well bite the bullet and ask mentors for resources, because I just feel like I'm treading water on this one.

[jsd]

thanks!

For Linux+, I much preferred CompTIA Linux+ / LPIC-1 Cert Guide: (Exams LX0-103 & LX0-104/101-400 & 102-400) by Ross Brunson, Sean Walberg, which is an ebook the mentors can give you. The uCertify wasn't bad, but I liked this better. I didn't bother with uCertify for the second exam, just that book and the video sources below.

I don't remember exactly how you sign up, but WGU provides three free months of LinuxAcademy.com, which i really liked as well (if you use this, watch the video series for the current Linux+ version, they still have the old ones on there too). If you're a more visual learner and want to give up on uCertify, the mentors will give you links to LabSim/Testout videos, which were decent enough.

Make sure you're also watching the recorded cohort/webinars from Mike. I forget how many there are, but there aren't many per exam and you can speed them up. He casually touches on stuff that you will definitely see on the exam, so pay attention. They're not too dull.

I spent about three weeks on exam 1 over-preparing, and then when I realized how much better LPI does the exams than CompTIA, I realized I shouldn't have worried so much and only spent one week I think on exam 2.

I do have some casual end-user experience with linux on my home machine though. But nothing too in-depth or on the admin side.

Look, if you could handle all of that cisco stuff, you won't have issues with Linux+! You've got this!

(sorry, I forgot I said I'd share Linux stuff earlier)

[Thorne]

For Linux+, I much preferred CompTIA Linux+ / LPIC-1 Cert Guide: (Exams LX0-103 & LX0-104/101-400 & 102-400) by Ross Brunson, Sean Walberg, which is an ebook the mentors can give you. The uCertify wasn't bad, but I liked this better. I didn't bother with uCertify for the second exam, just that book and the video sources below.

I don't remember exactly how you sign up, but WGU provides three free months of LinuxAcademy.com, which i really liked as well (if you use this, watch the video series for the current Linux+ version, they still have the old ones on there too). If you're a more visual learner and want to give up on uCertify, the mentors will give you links to LabSim/Testout videos, which were decent enough.

I'll be making the switch sometime tomorrow, methinks.

Make sure you're also watching the recorded cohort/webinars from Mike. I forget how many there are, but there aren't many per exam and you can speed them up. He casually touches on stuff that you will definitely see on the exam, so pay attention. They're not too dull.

Downloaded those on day 1 from the Drive link. I tend to like the webinars because they are laser-focused (except the Project+, those were a waste of time).

I've got a little experience with Linux as a casual user, and I took a class on the very basics (cat, grep, vi, ls, and cd was virtually the entire class). Most of this is fairly new.

Look, if you could handle all of that cisco stuff, you won't have issues with Linux+! You've got this!

(sorry, I forgot I said I'd share Linux stuff earlier)

Thanks for the vote of confidence, and thanks for the information! No worries on the time, I'm just glad you were willing to offer it in the first place.

[jsd]

Actually now that I'm looking at it, I think I got free Linux Academy by following this info I found on Reddit, not through WGU, sorry about that...

You can get 3 months free membership to Plural Sight as well as Linux academy if you join the free dev essentials program at Microsoft. You also get a ton of credit to use on Azure so you can spin up Linux Vms for practice purposes.

https://www.visualstudio.com/dev-essentials/

Any tips for Project+? I'm on it now. I'm hoping just watching the PluralSight series will be enough. But it's dry. (PluralSight was something I definitely got free though WGU, and it doesn't look like it's limited to 3 months like it is through the above link and like Linux Academy is).

[Thorne]

Actually now that I'm looking at it, I think I got free Linux Academy by following this info I found on Reddit, not through WGU, sorry about that...

You can get 3 months free membership to Plural Sight as well as Linux academy if you join the free dev essentials program at Microsoft. You also get a ton of credit to use on Azure so you can spin up Linux Vms for practice purposes.

https://www.visualstudio.com/dev-essentials/

No worries! I'll check it out when I've caught a few z's.

Any tips for Project+? I'm on it now. I'm hoping just watching the PluralSight series will be enough. But it's dry. (PluralSight was something I definitely got free though WGU, and it doesn't look like it's limited to 3 months like it is through the above link and like Linux Academy is).

Sure thing!

I made a heavily compressed 21-page packet covering the whole of the uCertify material for the PK0-004. Having gone through the course, it covers about 85% of what's on the test. Link to PDF. Link to DOCX.
If you really hate uCertify, just make sure to use the quizzes and read the Exam Essentials and Summary section.

If you have access to CBT Nuggets, check out the 2016 PMP course by Caseley. This was golden for the exam, even if it was a bit deep (Project+ is CAPM Lite and CAPM is PMP Lite, after all). I listened to these at 1.5x speed and burned through them all in 2 days.


Check these notes out. They were made by some dude on TechExams for the PK0-003 (old exam) and may cover a few gaps that my notes missed. Note that these are more focused on the formulas and math, and are missing the Agile methodology entirely (a topic that had 4-6 questions on my exam). I did not use these, but a lot of people on TechExams said this really helped them on the test.

Get your hands on the PK0-004 Practice Exam book by Feddersen (ISBN: 9781119363354). It's got 1100 practice questions, which were my benchmark to ensure I was ready for the test. My goal was 85% in each domain, which seemed prudent.

The test was not at all focused on formulas, but was really focused on risks and constraints. That in mind, the webinars for risks and constraints are good to make sure you know the information, but not good as a primary learning tool. The Fearless Formulas webinar is also good, but don't stress about Earned Value Management too much (I think I had one question involving math and one more regarding a performance index or variance).

The uCertify practice tests were about the same difficulty as the actual exam, covering a lot (probably around 80%) of the same information. At minimum, I would recommend you read a chapter of my notes + the exam summary, then take the chapter test. If you hit 80% plus, you understood everything I did in no time flat (each chapter of mine is 1-3 pages, plus 1-2 for the summary, so 2-5 pages total, as opposed to 25-35 per chapter).

DO NOT waste your money and buy the OCG. The OCG is the Sybex book that the course is based upon, so if you want to read the book, use the course.

I think that's it. I sincerely apologize for this being an infodump.

[jsd]

Wow! Thanks for all of this! This is a ton of helpful stuff. Now I feel like I kind of phoned-it-n helping you with Linux+

[jsd]

it definitely focused on commands and locations more so

[Thorne]

Passed the LX0-103. Thanks again for the tips!

[jsd]

Awesome! I knew you'd nail it. I saw your post in your own thread about it, I definitely agree, it is such a straight-forward exam (without all of the CompTIA linguistic non-sense) that it was actually kind of fun to take. Passing part one made me much more comfortable heading in to part 2, and I sped up my study time frame considerably between part one and part two

[Thorne]

Awesome! I knew you'd nail it. I saw your post in your own thread about it, I definitely agree, it is such a straight-forward exam (without all of the CompTIA linguistic non-sense) that it was actually kind of fun to take. Passing part one made me much more comfortable heading in to part 2, and I sped up my study time frame considerably between part one and part two

I'm hoping to speed up for this one too. The webinars are very bootcamp-esque and do an awful lot to compress the exam objectives into a few hours and the embedded CBT nuggets videos offered me more information (in an interesting way to boot) than all of the written material in the course did. 

Just for the sake of keeping up, are you still working on the ICND2, or are you working on something else first?