I would like to become a Linux Systems Administrator, I'm currently reading Linux Bible by Christopher Negus, just started a few days ago in fact. Just wanted to get some advice on a road map for my education in Linux.
Any advice for the next step for my career path, books, certifications?
What in your experience looked good on your resume, or on other's resumes that made you hire them?
Lastly, what pitfalls should I avoid or know of when venturing down this path; what companies to avoid and companies to shoot for?
I live in Austin Tx, so the opportunity is here, just need to go for it. TIA
If you're not doing anything specialised and aren't planning on going to Uni, to get your foot in the door you'll need to get some basic certification under your belt.
www.lpi.org is the place to start.
Then once you're employed you can get paid training for the expensive enterprise certs like, RHCE, SUN, ORACLE, Novell etc. This will help to move up into an linux specialist/engineering role.
Then once you're sick of it all, and trust me you will be. Get more paid training and do a masters or doctorate in Systems management, and move up to becoming a CIO.
Then you can work on your barista skills, golf game, fishing etc during the 9-5pm.
Or just go to Uni and do the Systems management role in the first place ;)
RHEL.. just go RHEL when your older, for now focus on Linux+ and living on Linux.
RHCE is your first red hat exam and you cannot do another exam without it, its their base exam, and it can be rather difficult, most difficult is enterprise monitoring and performance tuning (RH442)
Linux+ will give you a great base.
Also I would go Scripting over actual programming, bash and python, maybe come C but dont let it take over like bash and python should, you need to be able to script to automate tasks, again bare metal Linux and you can do it live, dont bother with VMs if you want to make a career on Linux.
get Networking qualifications maybe CISCO or Comptia then follow your heart from there.
I recommend both Linux+ and Network+ books from amazon based on the actual exams, they are great reads and inform you well, while keeping it simple.
learn to use CentOS, Debian and some bleeding edge distros (In VMs for bleeding edge) CentOS is good for red hat, but be careful you cant get all the red hat tools needed, but you can get alternatives which work the same.
Also look at openstack, seems to be the future, if you get good, try IBM or RHEL for it, become super good, and live well and rich.