I downloaded the Windows executable version of the prepkit, in hope that I will be able to make it work on my Macbook. No such luck. I tried Wine and CrossOver, but it kept on crashing. After several hours of frustration I emailed back the guys at uCertify with the issue. They suggested using the web version of the prepkit – at the the time I didn’t know there was a web version – which worked like a charm on all platform. So, first lesson learned – if you have a Linux / Mac system – go straight to the web version.

Usability, look and feel

I found the prepkit to be particularly easy to use. The interface is really straight forward, very clean, with good typography that doesn’t tire your eyes. Typography is particularly in this case, as geeks – myself included – wear glasses and don’t like hard to read “artistic” fonts.

The information is structured in a logical manner, everything is where you expect it to be. Just have a quick look to the screenshot on the right!

Maximum score to usability & ease of use.

Features

The information is divided into 3 main areas: Learn & Practice, Study Material and Performance Assessment and Analytics and each section is divided into multiple sub-sections.

The Learn & Practice section is comprised of various tests, which can be used to mimic a real life exam (Test mode), study (Learning mode) or to review your knowledge (Review mode). Screenshot to the right!

Study Material is comprised of:

• Subject/Exam Standards & Objectives
• Study notes
• Articles
• Flash Cards
• Key Terms
• Glossary
• Online Reference Library
• Study Tips

…and Performance Assessment and Analytics of:

• Study Planner
• Progress reports
• My Activity
• Daily Snapshot
• My Focus
• Performance on Practice Tests
• Readiness Report

Some of the features are really cool, I especially liked the Study Planner, which helps you plan and keep track of your progress, a very important tool as we all know that IT guys are generally lazy and don’t like reading manuals.

Although getting messages like:

Your preparation is about 0.5% complete. You took 1 days to complete 0.5%. At this pace you will need another 6 Months, 2 Weeks, 5 Days, to be fully prepared for the exam.

might be a bit demotivational.

Usefulness

To make things clear from the start, this is not an online course for beginners. The prepkit targets experienced professionals, not learners or script kiddies. But that’s not necessarily bad, as the last two categories are not even eligible for certification according to EC-Council’s eligibility form.

As I have yet to take the CEH exam, I can’t say how accurate or useful the questions are in a real life scenario, but given uCertify’s vast experience in the area of preparation kits for top IT certifications, I’m sure it’s useful.

Conclusion

I found the prepkit easy to use, filled with high quality information and well structured. I think it’s a good deal for $119.99 (aprox. €91 / £75), especially since uCertify offers a full refund if you fail the exam. Give it a try. Or if my review didn’t convince you, try it for your self. There’s a demo version available here.

Thing is that I bought a voucher for this exam about an year ago, and, as most Zend issued vouchers, it only lasts one year. So, few weeks ago I found myself with an already paid non-refundable voucher bound to expire. Since I had nothing to lose, I decided to take my chances and take the exam. And I did Hooray for me!

About the exam

The Zend Framework is much more “to the point” than the PHP 5 and it’s a piece of cake for the seasoned Zend Framework developer. No more “which comes first: the needle or the haystack?” questions. Everything is focused on asserting the fact that the candidate has the knowledge required to be productive using ZF. The topics cover a large part of the ZF manual, with focus on commonly used features. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t pay attention to more “exotic” topics like Zend_Memory, Zend_TimeSync or Zend_Wildfire. Although the test refers to version 1.5 of Zend Framework – the current version is 1.11 – there’s nothing specific to that version and the questions refer to those features that are common throughout all the versions (MVC, coding standards, plugins, validator chains, etc).

PS: don’t email me asking for the questions to the test! Go study…

Also note that the kit is not meant to teach you how to use Linux or to prepare you for a sysadmin job. Its stated goal is to prepare you for the CompTIA Exam, nothing more, nothing less. If you want to learn the inner workings of *nix operating systems, this kit isn’t for you, but if you already know how to use linux and want to get the ComTIA certification to prove your skills then using this kit to get acquainted with the exam’s requirements and methodology is a fairly good idea.

General information

uCertify is a company founded in 1997 and it specialises in creating preparation kits for major IT certification. Now their offer includes preparation kits for Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, CompTIA, Adobe, Sun Java and many more IT certifications available out there. Check out their site for more info. The kit I’m reviewing in this post is written to aid candidates in taking the CompTIA’s Linux+ exam. This vendor-neutral certification specifically designed to certify technical entry-level skills for Linux system administrators.

Download and install

In order to install the preparation kit on you machine, you have to download a small Windows executable file. You punch in the licence key and you’re done. If you’re using Windows that is. If you’re using a different OS, like I am, things get more complicated. The prepkit doesn’t work well with wine. By “not well” I mean “not at all”. No matter how hard I’ve tried, I just couldn’t get it to work. The application kept freezing and I kept xkill-ing it. But, fortunately enough I still have a Windows OS installed on a virtual machine under qemu on my laptop and, as I said before, installing the kit on Windows is a piece of cake.

The kit

The kit is really easy to use, with a well designed user interface and good typography so the texts can be easily read by glasses wearing nerds like myself. I don’t think the average user will have any difficulties using it, further more a candidate for a serious IT certification.

It doesn’t have any useless “Linux was written by a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds” yatta-yatta. It goes straight to the point and focuses on the exam’s objectives right from the start. When you start the application, this is what you find:

The kit has one 15 questions diagnostic test, 8 (A to H) 42 questions tests and one final test. It also provides several ways to combine the questions into new tests, according to one’s own timetable and preferences. Each test can be taken either in “Test mode” or “Learning mode”. Test Mode simulates an actual exam, you just go through all the questions and get the results and feedback at the end of the test, while in learning mode, you get the feedback on each question’s page, after you’ve punched in the answer. I took the first exam myself and…I’ve failed it! Badly…

It seems that I still have a lot to learn before taking the real life exam. And I use Ubuntu daily on my laptop, so the test is pretty hardcore and well focused on the exam objectives from CompTIA. I could find a single question mismatched from this goal. Everything is sysadmin related, nothing about wine, cedega, deCSS or other linux topics that aren’t mentioned in the objectives. And with which I’m very familiar with.

The kit also includes exam objectives, flash cards, study notes, articles and study tips. The flash cards are an imaginative feature, they are meant to help you remember notions by typing them over and over again, until they get in your head. Another fun feature: sometimes, in the tests, you must identify ports or computer parts by clicking on them with the mouse:

Is it worth the money?

With a sale price tag of 74.98 US dollars (about 60 euros), the cost of the preparation kit is about one third of the exam fee and about the same as a practice book from CompTIA. But the kit offers so much more than just a simple book. When I prepare for an exam, I find it very usefully to have some form of auto evaluation as close as possible to the exam.

When I was preparing for the Zend Certified Engineer exam, I’ve paid $30 on the pdf version of the Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide and $22 for 10 mock up exams. Zend’s preparation exams didn’t offer any useful feedback, in the way that the uCertify kit does. The kit offers detailed and useful feedback on each question (Zend only offers a hint like “You should improve your knowledge of XML parsers”). The feedback page looks something like this:

Just for the record, I know what the file command does. I’ve just clicked on the wrong answer to make a point.

If you’re interested in this kit, and want to see for yourself what uCertify offers, check out the free trial.

The preparation kit is good, I’m looking forward for the actual exam. But I would like to have the preparation kit as a web based application and perhaps in the future uCertify will consider delivering the kit on the web. Flash, Javascript, I don’t care as long as I don’t have to emulate a whole Windows operating system to run the kit. This is the only downfall I’ve found so far…

I’ll post a follow up after I’ll take the exam.

Even if I work in a very prosperous company and it’s unlikely that the recession will get to me (by the way, we’re hiring – so have a look at our openings on www.zitec.com), I’ve decided to spend some time and bucks on my education this year. I’ve taken the Zend Certified Engineer exam for PHP 5 in January and I want to continue with the Comptia Linux+ exam. Today, courtesy of uCertify, I’ve received this Comptia Linux+ preparation kit for review. I haven’t got the time to review it yet, but I know now what I’m doing this weekend

Stay tuned!

Here’s my Zend Yellow Pages Profile.