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Sun (R) Certified System Administrator for Solaris (TM) 10 Study Guide (Exams 310-200 & 310-202) Review by Shaun Walter
I passed 310-200 with 65% - not good as sole study guide
I used this book to study for 310-200 exam 1 and ONLY JUST passed the exam (passed with 65% on 7/29/09). The only reason I passed is because I've been supporting Solaris 10 for 3 years. The book does not provide the depth necessary to really learn those features you haven't used extensively. For the 310-202 exam 2, I purchased a web-based course from SUN with ePractice exams. This was much more in-depth covering Zones, ZFS, Jumpstart, Name Services, RBAC and other topics each in their own chapter/module. These are complex topics that are very deep and broad. This book cannot cover those topics in sufficient depth by combining Zones, Jumpstart, Flash Archives into one chapter. These should EACH get a chapter to cover the material in sufficient depth to understand and make the necessary links. And I saw NO mention of WAN Booting at all! No mention of the ldap_client_file and ldap_client_cred files or what each contain. This was on the exam! Because I used additional material for exam 2, I recently passed exam2 (12/29/09) with 82%. Exam 2 is much harder than exam 1 and covers much more information.
If you already have this book, don't rely soley on this book to pass the exam. At least buy a good Solaris 10 reference book to walk you through the topics and use this book to hit all the important key points for the exam. Even memorizing this book will not give you the understanding of the topics to correctly answer questions. The exam will give you 9 commands and ask you to choose the three commands that will each solve the stated problem. If you haven't learned the Core and Crash Dump management topic, you won't understand how to temporarily disable core files from being created and redirect core files to all go to a specific directory.
My suggestion - Download VMWARE Server (free) and install, Download Solaris 10 x86 (free) and install 3 instances of Solaris 10 in separate virtual machines. Boot these virtual machines and run through each topic. You'll want a dual or quad core machine with 4GB ram minimum. Consider purchasing "Solaris 10: The complete reference" but also download the PDF files on Solaris 10 Administration (free) from SUN. Print the PDFs and have them bound (about $5 per binding at kinkos, staples, officemax). Use these as your reference material and write your notes in them. For each exam topic, make sure you've used the utility or service in the solaris 10 virtual machines. Lastly, purchase a used SUN SPARC machine ($150-$200) to run through OpenBoot config and advanced installation from OpenBoot.