Solaris Certification Series

The purpose of this page is to provide support information for the Solaris Certification series of trade books written by Dr. Paul A. Watters.

Details of the Solaris Certification exams are available here.

The Complete Reference series for Solaris covers releases 8 and 9.

One thing that I have noticed from reviews of the series is that readers report that (a) there is material in the books that are not present in the exam and (b) there is material in the exam which is not covered in the book. I should stress two important facts here: firstly, I do not represent Sun Microsystems in any way, so the chapter layout and design is based on the public curriculum provided by Sun; and secondly, building up your skillset around as many Solaris technologies as possible will make you a better sysadmin, and indirectly help you in the exam. This is because Solaris (and UNIX and Linux) have a large number of implicit patterns in administration that can be thought of as the "Solaris Way".

Developing the insight into the underlying philosophy of Solaris as an operating system is essential to passing any exam - there is no substitute for experience in system administration, and reading any number of guide books, certification guides, practice exams etc will not make you a UNIX guru if you don't practice your skills. Books are a great way of assisting you, but - just like mathematics - you can't learn how to be a good sysadmin by parroting answers from a practice exam.