New to It looking for help!!
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This community has a heavy hardware focus and you will learn a ton just hanging around. I lurk a ton and read every post I can. If someone brings up a technology, I research it, and understand it. You should also balance that with a little software side of the computer coin. Go to Codeacadamy.com and learn the basics of a couple languages. Then setup a little home lab, with a computer, a server (could be as cheap as a raspberry pi), and network them together. Doing all this will give you the ground level for everything that get's thrown under the name IT. You will know pretty quick what you like and what to focus on, or you will end up like me and holding jobs in development, networking, and system admin within the last few years.
Lastly, keep this in mind. While you do all this, pay attention to your mood. You should feel like a kid in a candy store trying to learn this stuff. If you feel like this sucks but it will pay off if you get through the hard part of learning the basics, then reevaluate what you want to do, because it doesn't get much different, the problems just get more complicated. I have seen too many people who wouldn't setup their own home project to learn, or learn a single language on their own go and pay for college in CIS. They were all miserable and non of them finished their degree. So make sure you are ok with life long learning, or you may want to look into an auxiliary IT field, like sales if you are good with talking to people, but not as involved in the technical side.
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@nadnerB said in New to It looking for help!!:
What are you looking at doing?
There's an up to date Linux Systems Admin learnings section https://mangolassi.it/topic/7825/sam-learning-linux-system-administration
Starting work on a Windows Admin book as well, but that will take more time and doesn't have a table of contents page, yet.
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@WrCombs said in New to It looking for help!!:
@DustinB3403 See ive alway found that i can read something, then tinker with it and do the hands on side of working. And as of right now, i have no idea what part of It I want to do..
That's tough, one of the most important things is knowing, at least in a general sense, what kind of IT career you are wanting. The field is so big that it is really easy to get stuck or lost in one part and never discover the parts that you would be most interested in or nor never manage to move over to them.
What is your IT work background and history, and what IT work are you doing right now? What areas of IT are currently of the most interest to you, and which parts are the least (of those that you know?)
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@WrCombs said in New to It looking for help!!:
@DustinB3403 thats what i was thinking and have been told before too. Question is, where do i start an internship?
https://mangolassi.it/topic/9942/looking-for-highshool-it-intern/
They are looking for highschool, but not exclusively so. NTG is world renowned and nothing but IT.
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@DustinB3403 said in New to It looking for help!!:
@WrCombs said in New to It looking for help!!:
@DustinB3403 Any suggestions on books, programs i should work on?
That is entirely subjective, most of the material in books are going to be dated by at least 2 years. This doesn't mean it's not relevant, just that you're learning "old hat things".
Getting a job as desktop one, or jun. net admin or jun. sys admin would be better routes IMO.
I'm a big proponent of books. Books should teach theory, concepts and ideas. Very little of that changes in IT even over decades. The stuff that I was learning from books in the 1990s is still 99% relevant today and most of the stuff that I consult on most is just 1990's knowledge combined with a modern knowledge of what is available on the market. The foundational knowledge is nearly all identical.
Now, picking out good books is a challenge because you still need books based around the things that you want to learn.
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@scottalanmiller My It work background is very minimal. I did take a year long class in middle school as i said, it was also almost 6 years ago to date, outside of that mostly what ive done is work with computers that had virus' or needed reprogrammed which i just watched mostly. Now im not doing any real IT work, im trying to learn however so that one day i could get back into the career that emerged while i was taking the classes.
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@coliver said in New to It looking for help!!:
@WrCombs said in New to It looking for help!!:
@DustinB3403 Ive heard sys. admin before, but what job duties does that include? I took a programming class in middle school HTMI, wasnt very fond of writing programs. I also took IT essentials, which was based on Cisco networking learning about pretty much the very bare essentials for IT; all hardware, some software, trouble shooting. With that course i was required to take a mock up of the exam, which i passed with flying colors, which is where i found my interest in IT
Systems Administrators manage backend systems and servers. They manage the platform and application layer generally, in some places they also manage the infrastructure but that is in smaller shops I think. Rarely (never) does a Sys Admin touch a desktop or a network switch.
A "true" System Admin never touches anything but operating systems. They don't manage platforms (hardware or virtualization) nor do they manage applications. It's a grey area, but sometimes they will manage system inclusive application platforms like Apache, NGinx, MariaDB, etc. and in some even that is not something that they manage and those are handed off to Application Administrators. Technically if nothing but desktop OSes were being managed, you could say that that is a System Admin as well, but almost no one including huge shops have that position, desktop people almost always support apps and end users as well.
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@scottalanmiller to continue with the above; im mostly interested in server admin, network admin, anything that has to do with working with networks my least favorite would be webdesign
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@WrCombs As much as everyone here wants you to research, don't try to look up job descriptions to get a sense of what a network admin or server admin's responsibilities are (or any title really). You will learn quickly that virtually no company does that well.
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Job descriptions are like nether regions, everyone has one, and they're all pretty much fowled up...
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@DustinB3403 thats for anything though, i was doing heating and cooling installs for a while. and the job description was polar opposite of what i was actually doing...
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@scottalanmiller Any particular books that you would recommend offhand?
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@WrCombs said in New to It looking for help!!:
@DustinB3403 thats for anything though, i was doing heating and cooling installs for a while. and the job description was polar opposite of what i was actually doing...
Sure there are a lot of jobs where you end up doing all sorts of things, like plumbing when you're IT 1. Or some other random crap. Good businesses though won't ask you to do something to "fill a gap" if it's a business need, then the business (good ones) will hire someone to perform that job function.
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@DustinB3403 yeah, i agree.
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@tiagom said in New to It looking for help!!:
@scottalanmiller Any particular books that you would recommend offhand?
Not really, although for general IT, that's a lot of what we work on with http://smbitjournal.com/ and it is effectively a book-like format.
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@wirestyle22 said in New to It looking for help!!:
@WrCombs As much as everyone here wants you to research, don't try to look up job descriptions to get a sense of what a network admin or server admin's responsibilities are (or any title really). You will learn quickly that virtually no company does that well.
In fact, it will lead you far, far away from reality. You'll begin to think that SMBs actually hire system admins (they do not) and that networking engineering is the most common job in IT (it's very rare) and that security is a real career option (it is not, jobs exist but only one for everyone one thousand kids going to college for it) or that degrees will get you a job (they'll just take you out of the job market for four years while your peers gain experience.)
The average job posting is fake (literally, not even a real job at the end of it) and written by someone that doesn't know what the job would entail even if it were real and just makes crap up.
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@WrCombs said in New to It looking for help!!:
@scottalanmiller to continue with the above; im mostly interested in server admin, network admin, anything that has to do with working with networks my least favorite would be webdesign
Web Design is a design discipline, not actually part of IT
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@scottalanmiller said in New to It looking for help!!:
@WrCombs said in New to It looking for help!!:
@scottalanmiller to continue with the above; im mostly interested in server admin, network admin, anything that has to do with working with networks my least favorite would be webdesign
Web Design is a design discipline, not actually part of IT
However @WrCombs , managing the servers for a web hosting company would be--as an example.
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@scottalanmiller Excellent, thank you.
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@wirestyle22 ahh my mistake
