Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Summary:
This full-color hands-on guide book has been enhanced to make learning even easier by offering more detailed lab setup instructions, expanded chapter summaries, and new practice exams that will reinforce the skills learned. It will empower students to successfully pass the MCSE/MCSA certification exam while preparing them to face the real-world challenges of a Microsoft networking professional. The book includes a CD-ROM featuring CoursePrep ExamGuide content as well as CoursePrep test preparation software from MeasureUp, a company approved by Microsoft to develop MCP Exam test prep software offering demos and practice exams.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Substandard Content, Often Too Dumbed-Down
Customer Rating:
I won't mention every shortcoming of this book, because some other reviewers already covered them. (I agree 100% with what everyone said about the poor question selection/writing.), and I had no desire to finish this poor book and so only went as far as the chapters we used in class.
I consider myself a "power user", and I DO expect that with most computer texts, at least half the material will NOT be new. However, this book is just ultra dumbed-down. The vast majority of "exercises" are really just ad-naseum, click-by-click steps to using this GUI applet or that.
Also, most of the lessons just relate to the most basic stuff, like viewing your CPU usage and so forth -- just basic user stuff!
In fact, the only useful thing I recall gleaning from this book at all is how to create a custom management console...something that has since become a basic tool in getting Windows' configuration and security under MY control, not Microsoft's.
I would recommend photocopying any few useful how-tos out of this text and then tossing the book after the class is done (literally, or figuratively "tossing" it back on Amazon).
Good book, yes; but not so good !
Customer Rating:
I got this book from my training center. As the previous reviewer mentions, it seems that it is a draft instead of "An Enhanced Second Edition." You are going to find a LOT OF MISTAKES. It seems that the editorial forgot to assigned the right people to revise this book. If the authors (and editors) would dedicated a little more time and effort on it, this book could be an excellent one; and I said EXCELLENT. I like the activities included through the chapters and in the Lab Manual. I am in chapter 5, and I have found a lot of incongruencies (errors). You may get lost in some of the labs because the authors jump steps without telling you. I haven't taken the exam, so I can't tell you if the objectives in this book are the ones set for the 70-270 exam, but if the book shows so much errors, it seems that it could be the case. So, I decided to get Sybex's MCSA/MCSE Windows Professional. I have read four chapters from Sybex's book and I can said this one is a very good book, but this is just for the exam preparation not for learning Windows XP Pro.
I would recommend you to get another book. Thompson Course Technology has good books, but this one is not the case.
Poor quality, no LabMentor CD bunded with Amazon
Customer Rating:
Its not Amazon's fault that this book isn't really good. The information contained inside it is out of date, written during the time of XP's release.
The major drawback is this book does not contain the LabMentor Online Lab disk, which prevents me from completing most of the course work for me class.
Lousy book!!
Customer Rating:
This book is awful,asks questions in chapter reviews that are either not in the book or in another chapter. I wasted untold hours of my life in this book.I have strongly recomended that the school I attend stop using this worthless piece of trash.
Buy something else
Customer Rating:
Badly organized and practice questions are compatible with the material. One minute, the author is talking about one subject, then the next, the author changes the subject. Then later in the book the author will bring up a separate section aimed and explaining more of the first topic that was being discussed earlier in the book.
The questions on the end of the chapter are mostly based on interpretation of material rather than understanding. When you search the book for answers, you wont find the exact answer within the reading, you'll find material about the answer, then its up to you on how well you'll interpret it to come up with the right answer. The author also seems to contradict himself/herself, or purposely confuse you. When discussing SYSPREP, one minute the author says that its a system imaging program, and the next the author says that SYSPREP not and that SYSPREP requires third-party imaging programs.
It seems as if the author also wants you to do extra in-depth research on material, because some of the answers to the questions you don't get unless you experiment with it.
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