@ryanblahnik said:
If a lot of these seem to have more value from the material studied than from the cert itself, are there any others that stand out as covering important ground?
I found the process of getting my certs to be incredibly valuable. Probably on par with any of my top learning for my career. It was the late 1990s and I did every CompTIA exam at the time and the hardest, longest Microsoft track and a huge number of Brainbench certs all over just like two or three years. I never once attended a class, I bought loads of books, got an ancient Pentium server (yes the original 586 single proc box!) and about five old desktops mostly 486, one Pentium and two PPros and built everything from scratch and did every lab and tested every configuration. No virtualization back then. And MS trials were 90 days, not 180. And an NT4 install could take two days!! And 33Kb/s dial up Internet access at best.
Reading the books, cover to cover, doing every example as I went forced me to learn the material including the concepts. Doing the actual certs forced me to not skip over details that seemed unimportant. It made me work to completeness and many of the concepts that I would have ignored when I was young turned out to be very important and the people writing the books had a good idea of what I needed to know 🙂
