Category:

Tech Books

Great advice for building a successful IT career

by Philip Sellers April 17, 2015

<br /> If you’ve spent any time at all in the IT field, you know that there is a lot more than just being skilled with computers needed to be successful in the IT industry. There’s a range of life skills needed that surround your technical competence that will help to make you successful. Author Warren Zabloudil has written a book specifically about developing these skills in yourself. The book is titled Excellence in IT: Achieving Success in an Information Technology Career.

While I don’t get a lot of time to read, when I do make the time it is usually tech related and something that I want to learn. In this case, I’d term this book more personal development than technical skill development. But I’m very glad that I spent the time to read Excellence in IT.

First of all, the book is extremely well written and easy to follow. Just like the principles that Zabloudil explains, the book is well organized and clear. The book is grouped around topics like stress management, understanding end-users, being a good team member, developing your skills and identifying bad habits that are land mines to your career.

I don’t know that I have ever encountered a self-help book that so closely aligned with my personal beliefs. The advice that he shares is much the same as I would share with someone just starting their career in IT. Zabloudil gives great advice in areas like managing stress and workload as an IT worker, which are two areas that can easily overtake the most technically competent individual. And beyond the things I agreed with, I found things that challenged me and my bad habits in my day-to-day job. This book will provoke you to think and hopefully help bring awareness and change to areas to help you succeed.

I’d highly recommend to anyone wanting to polish their skills and excel in a IT career, particularly IT project managers, developers and systems administrators (of course). The book is available on Amazon and is about 150 pages long. It is published by Universal Publishers. Zabloudil is a MCSE and a CNE according to his bio and has over twenty-five years experience as an administrator. He currently works for a Department of Defense think tank.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a copy of the book for review, however, the review is my honest assessment of the book and its contents. In short, I enjoyed the book…

April 17, 2015 0 comment

Book Review: VCAP5-DCA Official Cert Guide: VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5- Data Center Administration

by Philip Sellers February 13, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

<br /> Last October, I sat for and passed the VCAP5-DCA exam. One of the resources that I used to prepare for the exam was the official certification guide book written by Steve Baca and John Davis. This book unpacks the blueprint of the VCAP5-DCA exam and goes over all of the required sections that you will need to demonstrate in the exam.

The exam is essentially a lab environment where you are given a number of scenarios that you must complete the configuration changes within a working vSphere environment. The book is more of an encyclopedia of all that the test covers than a novel.

This book and the exam it is preparing you for isn’t for a beginner – I’ll say that up front. You’re expected to show competency on a wide range of administration tasks on the exam and the book walks you through those very clearly and it is targeted at someone with existing administration knowledge. Each chapter includes a quiz to test your knowledge and give you insight over whether or not you already know the content they’re about to delve into. These helped me identify what areas of the chapter to especially pay attention to.

If you’re a systems administrator or implementor by trade – focus on the things you don’t regularly – and this book is a fantastic resource to familiarize yourself. If you focus exclusively on Fibre Channel storage, focus on NFS and iSCSI for the exam. If you use PowerCLI exclusively for command line, spend time with ESXCLI. The tasks you perform often will come naturally in this exam and you have normal online help and VMware’s PDF documentation to fall back on, but time is a big factor in passing the exam, so familiarity is required.

The book covers all the bases, in depth, and is the best book for the task of preparing for this exam. There are other study guides and resources available and I used some freely available resources in addition to this book to prepare, but after I took the exam, my appreciation for this book increased a lot. There’s a lot of information presented and it can be overwhelming, but the authors have done a great job organizing and covering the information in this comprehensive study guide for the VCAP5-DCA.

With changes coming to the exams and certifications for vSphere 6, now’s the time to hunker down, grab this book and get that certification. Good luck!

February 13, 2015 0 comment

Tech Books

Book Review: VMware vSphere Resource Management Essentials

by Philip Sellers July 3, 2014

written by Philip Sellers

</p> <p>VMware vSphere Resource Management Essentials is a great resource for users getting started with vSphere and trying to understand the principles of resource management in shared computing environments. Virtualization on vSphere introduces lots of concepts for a newcomer and this book does a great job explaining those concepts, required licensing and specific vSphere features. It is a must read for beginners, small deployment administrators and admins with growing deployments of vSphere.

The book is a relatively short read at just over 100 pages and 4 chapters long. The chapters are logically arranged and step you through vSphere installation and configuration. The first chapter focuses on requirements and installation. The second and third chapters focus on the resource management features and the more advanced features respectively and the final chapter focuses on monitoring and management of resources.

Clearly focused on covering the basics, the book is focused towards new or beginner admins just breaking into vSphere. It is an easy read and experienced admins can learn a thing or two that we may have forgotten or overlooked in the past. I personally bookmarked a couple items related to licensing levels required for specific vSphere features and the book prompted me to go back and re-evaluate some of the ways I assign resource pools in my virtual infrastructure.

VMware vSphere Resource Management Essentials is written by Jonathan Frappier (@jfrappier) and published by Packt Publishing. It is available directly from Packt Publishing, from Amazon, and in lots of books stores worldwide.

July 3, 2014 0 comment