training: CCT and CCA under the belt, then what?

[edgardeveij]

Guys, gals,

To gain as much knowledge as possible about working with and setting up Casper Suite on supported platforms, would it be wise to sidestep for now and sign in for a CJA class? Or first follow the path and do a CCE course and then CJA.

Since CCE is much different in setup from the first two, and is all about testing your experience on the platform, I guess I don't 'learn' from taking this course and only test my knowledge. Then, to me, it seems logical to sidestep and sign in for a CJA class (and maybe do the CCE on later occasion). This from an integrator point of view.

Any experience or advice on this?

thanks,

Edgar

[ryanstayloradob]

I did CJA then CCE, only because the CCE wasn't available first. In hindsight, that's probably the best route. Taking the CJA first helped me when taking the CCE.

[sepiemoini]

@ryanstayloradobe Seconded! I did the same and found the CCE course to be much more approachable. With that said, the CJA is a real doozy.

[Sandy]

I have not taken the CJA, mostly because up to this point I have had a reliable infrastructure and had no big changes to that in sight.
I could be mistaken, but I read that course to cover all different types of HW/OS setups.

I took the CCE, and it was tough, and I learned a ton. At least at the time I took it, it was challenge based: you worked your problem and everyone shared their solutions. I find this for me to be a great way to learn!

[duffcalifornia]

@sepiemoini What type of server experience did you have prior to the CJA? I ask because I'm taking it in a month because my boss thinks somebody should, but servers and networking are definitely not my background (I'm more desktop support) and I'm a bit worried.

[sepiemoini]

@duffcalifornia I'm our JSS/Jamf Pro Administrator at my organization and had a handful of JSS/Jamf Pro server upgrades under my belt before taking the course. I was familiar with a lot of the course material since my environment is also clustered and under an on-premise Windows Server setup. There were certainly others without any experience and they seemed to do quite well too. I hope this helps!

[mm2270]

@duffcalifornia The CJA course is heavily server based. I had taken it a long time ago, early in its inception, so I'm sure a lot has changed since then, but back then there was little, if any, actual JSS GUI work. Its heavy command line driven and understanding things like load balancer configurations, understanding "instances", meaning having multiple separate JSS instances all running on one box (or virtual server), and how it all relates to Jamf Pro.
If you are command line averse at all, it could be pretty challenging. Again though, my knowledge of the course is very old at this point.

[edgardeveij]

Thank you for your insights.

Sandy's answer did get me to rethink. But I think I'll stick to the plan and do CJA first. But with Sandy's answer I'll definitly want to take the CCE course at later stadium. Seeing solutions and tricks your class colleagues come up with is a nice bonus and an invaluable asset to have.

Thanks again.

Edgar.

[donmontalvo]

Load Balancers and chaining certificates are what tripped me up in 2011 when Jamf held a pilot for CJA.

Having been involved in a good number of builds/rebuilds/scale-outs since then, hoping to ace it in March.

[tlarkin]

The CJA is all infrastructure and you will be using both Linux and Windows Servers. It teaches you the concepts of installing MySQL, Java, Tomcat, and configuring them to work in a load balanced environment. It has very little to do with client engineering on the Mac side. The CCE is more of a lab than an actual test. You sit through several labs a day and engineer a solution, and the test constantly rotates questions so I am not sure what the current set are. Each lab is contains unique specific questions where you will be asked to solve a problem in any way you can. So could be built in features, scripting/code, using the API, etc, is all allowed in the CCE. The best thing about the CCE in my personal opinion is the solution sharing when everyone talks about how they accomplished a problem.

I also highly recommend local university courses if you have that available and your Org offers tuition reimbursement. I took a Python Programming course through a local university and it was great. Anything with bash, python, swift, Linux, MySQL, etc would be a great course to take in my opinion. Some local universities may not offer that in your area though.