5/14/2008 -- I was struck by an odd observation this week. Desperately in need of shelf space, I began going through stacks of old books and tossing them or packing them away for storage.

Among the books on NetWare 3 -- the first Novell certification I earned -- I realized that there isn't a single thing in them that would be meaningful today; they were tossed. The first Microsoft certification I earned was on Windows 95 and, similarly, those books were tossed because nothing in them has merit anymore. Same story for Cisco and many others.

Then, there was Inside Unix. This was a book for which I actually wrote a few chapters in 1993 and was published in 1994. As I looked through this 14-year-old text, it struck me how it still contains much of what you'd need to know to pass a Linux certification today. While Microsoft, Novell, Cisco, Oracle and so many others have updated their products to the point where the exams no longer resemble the originals, Linux -- so often the darling of the cutting-edge -- still measures expertise in terms of knowing how to work with tools that are just plain old.

Look at the tools you need to know for the Linux+ exam from CompTIA: df, du, kill, ls, mv, rm, tar, umask, vi and so on. Sure, you might get a question or two about KDE or GNOME, but those would be rare and you could guess at every one of them and still get a passing percentage. The same is true of the LPI and all entry- and lower-level certification exams.

The most likely reason for this -- and one that might get brought up a few times in your comments -- is that when it comes to vendor-neutral testing, the focus is on the commonality between the distributions. Another possible reason is that Linux is so stable and supported by such a fine toolset that all you'd need to be a great administrator is to know the commands well.

These reasons are all well and good if you want to make Washington Irving proud -- but not if you want to authenticate an administrator with skills for today's world. I'd like to hire someone who knows something new, not something that existed before Netscape Navigator 1.0 was released. And I'd hope that the certifications they hold reflect that.

Book of the Week: 'Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Bible'
Richard Blum's newly published Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Bible has 800 pages showing you what you can do at the command line.

The "Advanced Topics" section of the book is divided into an eclectic mix of chapters from "Using the Web" to "Shell Scripts for Administrators." It's diverse, to say the least, considering that the Web chapter spotlights Lynx, cURL and networking with zsh (which gets its own chapter in another part of the book). There's also a chapter on e-mail that walks you through e-mail setup and configuration, and another chapter that offers some scripting examples you may find useful.

All in all, it's a good read and worth the investment if the command line -- or scripting at it -- seems a little foreign to you.