One of the things that has long bothered me about IT certification is that, unlike in so many other professional fields, certification is primarily seen as a way for vendors to sell training. Certification is seen by most providers as the end-goal of using a vendor service (IT education), and as such is as much a marketing tool as an educational one.

In helping LPI to rise from a pair of mailing lists into an international organization that is close to delivery of its 100,000th exam, I tried to move away from that model of certification as a marketing tool. One of the indications that we were on the right track is the large number of free or near-free courseware projects supporting the LPI program.

This means that any college, training company or independent instructor has access to some very good training materials for students, at little or no cost. Like the open source software whose operation they teach, these projects bring together communities to contunially enhance the quality and scope of their materials.

Here are the programs of which I am aware (sorted by language):

English:

• The online tutorials at IBM DeveloperWorks


• The LinuxIT GDPL'd LPI study guides, developed with help from the International Open Source Network of the United Nations Development Program


• This online book from Snow B. V. provides prep materials for LPI Level 2


• The South African "Learn Linux" project


• A set of modestly-named "training notes", released under the GDPL by Leading Edge in South Africa


• The Free Software Foundation Administration Manuals Project has produced a set of training manuals targeted at LPI exams 101, 102 and 201

Spanish:

• Study guides provided by LPI-Chile

(Brazilian) Portuguese:

• The Foca Linux project

German:

• Linux-Praxis provides a number of resources, including LPIC1 study guides in PDF format or a compressed collection of HTML, as well as LPI Level 2 study guides for Exam 201 and Exam 202

There are probably others; I have heard that Ubuntu is working on a free CD of course materals but I can't find many web-based references to this project.

Any pointers to other sources, or comments from those who have used the above materials, are welcomed.

PS: I'd be remiss If I didn't mention some high-quality material that's nonfree but fairly low cost. I've heard very good things about the LATM materials from Linup Front which are less than $30 commercially, and free of charge to academia. Not completely free but not bad either. So much for "total lack of choice"...