Best path to RHCE (besides taking classes)
 

For those that are RHCE certified I am interested how you went about preparing for it. I want to take the classes but they're way too expensive, and my company would be unwilling to pay for them since they don't use linux and our budget is limited since it's a non profit.

So I was wondering what method the RHCEs employed?

What books or other resources did you read? What kind of previous experience do you have? One thing i have in mind is reading the manuals Red Hat provides online and doing the labs in Micheal Jang's books on a virtual machine.

I have been using linux here at home for about a year now as my main OS, and might install it on my desktop at work. So what do you guys think? What would you reccomend?

Nothing beats hands-on experience and reading the manuals (nothing is on the tests that is not covered within the manuals);

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/

CentOS, Fedora Core and Scientific Linux are your bast choices to install/use if your not already using one of them. CentOS4 and SL4 are 100% binary compatible 'clones' of RHEL 4 which is what the tests are based on.

"RHCE Red Hat Certified Engineer Linux" by Yang, and do all of the excersizes. By able to everything they are likely to ask on the exam. CentOS is a fairly good substitute for Redhat Enterprise.

http://www.amazon.com/RHCE-Certified...e=UTF8&s=books

At least, that is how I would do it. But, I don't have an RHCE.

In addition to the already good suggestions, I'd say give yourself a lot more time playing around with RHEL (or FC). Install it, configure it, break it, fix it. You will need to know everything in the exam prep guide like the back of your hand -- another $749 ain't cheap if you don't.

I know you've explicitly said you do not want to take the formal classes, but if you should happen to change your mind, I was glad I took the RH300 class (which has the exam bundled with it), FWIW.

Keep at it, and best of luck.

Thank you for the suggestion but I am wondering what would you suggest I "break" and fix in RHEL?

Edit: BTW I use CentOS which is a clone of RHEL on vmware.

It's pretty straighforward. For example, take this from the "exam prep" guide:

"diagnose and correct boot failures arising from bootloader, module, and filesystem errors"

Think, what makes an error in the bootloader that leads to a boot failure - one thing is GRUB
Introduce an error into GRUB, such as a typo
See what happens

repeat with the other stuff. A lot of this kind of stuff is in the RHCE book you're reading.