There is growing demand for technicians with the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) qualification, and RHCE: Red Hat Certified Engineer Linux Study Guide can help you earn your ticket. This book patiently explains the material that appears on the RHCE exam with a practical eye--it is clear that the authors have spent time working and experimenting with Red Hat systems and know their subject well.

At one point, for example, the authors advocate creating an account with username root, then giving that account no access privileges at all (and assigning real administrative rights to another account). The idea is that a bad guy could spend all night trying to break into the root account, only to find it useless. This is no mere rehash of company exam specifications.

The authors are forthright with the facts and procedures you are expected to know cold on the exam. They present how-to information (such as disk partitioning strategies for Linux boxes that will play various roles) as recipes ready for you to try. You get file system mount options and other detail sets in tabular form. Each chapter concludes with a "Two-Minute Drill" that recounts key facts and important features of the operating system. There are practice questions at the ends of chapters, as well, with answers neatly listed (with discussions) in an appendix. Altogether, this one's a winner--it is a fine choice for RHCE candidates and all Red Hat administrators. --David Wall, Amazon.com

Topics covered: The contents of the RHCE exam, including open source legal issues, hardware compatibility, installation, file management, user management, kernel compilation, X Windows, Internet services and troubleshooting. The authors use Linux 6.1 in their examples.