CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide, Sixth Edition,   ISBN:9780072263114

Customer Rating: 

As a certified IT Technician I believe Mike Meyer's All-in-One CompTIA A+ exam guide is a well written, edited, and entertaining book that is well worth the modest price for its 1100+ pages. But do I think this book alone will help somebody pass the A+ Essentials and/or 220-602, 220-603, or 220-604 exams?

It really depends on the difficulty of the exams which does vary between tests, the real world experience of the tester, and whether the tester actually "reads" the book or simply skims it expecting a quick and easy pass. It seems many people I know who want to be techs are nothing more than moderately skilled users who think "it'd be fun" to work on computers for a living only to buy a book like this, plow through it, and fail the A+ miserably. Experience troubleshooting the pc's, printers, and networks of friends and family goes a long way in passing an exam like this along with a large library of accurate practice questions.

Meyer's book is definately a great resource, but I think those who say it lacks detail only read the book once or twice. I have found upon re-inspection some things I thought were left out are in indeed actually there. The visible pc, microprocessors, memory, hard drive technologies, removable media, video, sound, printers, and communication and professionalism chapters were quite detailed. I felt the networking chapter was adequate for the tests. Command line chapter was good although a handful of additional commands could have been mentioned. RAID could have gone into more detail. The security chapter was a little light.

While one other reviewer deeply criticized this book for its focus on history being useless, I am going to respectfully disagree. It is very important to know legacy devices and Meyer's discussion of earlier technology is crucial in passing the A+ exam.

But most importantly, I believe this book will help you become a good tech. Knowing a moderate amount of a lot of thing's will get you much farther in my opinion than knowing every minute detail of a small amount of thing's. Meyer's book accomplishes this. I have found that we are not going to retain everything we read and when you're halfway through this book I can virtually guarantee some information from chapter 2 will be forgotten. That's the way it goes. Meyer's presents the information in a way that is easier to retain and as a result I think more will be remembered when sitting at the testing station.

I believe one can pass the A+ exams with this book, but a large library of practice exams presented in a similar format as CompTIA's is absolutely necessary. Meyer's questions won't cut it. Also, real world experience is required. Learn/use keyboard shortcuts, memorize paths to system tools, use the command line when you could use explorer, do thing's outside of what you normally do and this will help you become a great tech and gain confidence for taking this and other exams.

For the price, this is a great book, and if you don't think it has enough information, please read it again before flaming.

Customer Rating: 

the book arrived in very good condition. this is a great book, very easy to understand.

Customer Rating: 

Today I passed the 601 and the 602 with scores of 814 and 854 respectively. This book certainly is a great tool to use for preparing for the A+. As the name implies, Meyers goes over more material than is needed. He provides background and historical information on things like hard drives that you don't need to know to pass, but I found it to be interesting and useful. Definitely take notes on things like memory types and speeds, socket types, LASER PRINTERS, and boot files. If you're a new PC tech, practice doing the procedures he talks about. Much of the A+ exams require you to know different paths to things (Desktop->Properties->Settings->Extend my monitor...). I read through the book once, then went back over some of the chapters I was a bit hazy on. The practice tests that come with the book on CD aren't that great. The real test is much more difficult.

I used the ExamCram practice questions book, which is very similar to the actual test. Some of the questions in it were even on the real exam. I also used the free CertBlaster software that can be found online somewhere. I would not have passed without these practice tests. They give you a good idea of just how tricky the real test is. When taking the real test, make sure to read the question slowly and read all the answers even if the right answer jumps off the screen at you.

Overall I would recommend this, but make sure you use some other practice tests. Also make sure you check out the forums at [...].

Good luck!

Customer Rating: 

While the book may be a bit lengthy, it contains everything you will need to know to pass the A+ exam (both parts). Most of the information is trivial but that is exactly what the A+ exam is. I suggest reading the book a chapter at a time and reviewing the information before moving on to the next. For additional help I would suggest the Exam Cram book because many of the questions in the book were on the exam I took or were so closely worded that they were nearly identical. If you're going to take the exam, buy this book and if you still want more practice, buy the Exam Cram book.

Customer Rating: 

This book really gives detailed troubleshooting techniques/solutions to questions that you would really see on the Certification Comptia A+ Exam. It was very well written and I would recommend this book to anyone who still have troubleshooting issues/questions and need detailed solutions.