Customer Reviews

CNE NetWare 5 Study Guide

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

(I sent this email to the public relations department at Osborne I was so irritated by this book)

I am writing to inform you of my complete dissatisfaction with your CNE Netware 5 study guide in the Global Knowledge Certification Press Series (ISBN 0-07-211923-3).

I just completed (and failed to pass) the Networking Technologies Exam (50-632) after studying from your book. What prompted me to write to you was the incredible incompleteness of your study guide and the incorrectness of the self test questions.

For example: On the exam, I was bombarded with questions relating to TCP/IP, subnetting, supernetting, creating subnet masks and assigning subnet addresses, the IEEE 802.x standards, non-routable protocols, etc. Your study guide makes no effort to cover these topics at all. Where I went into the exam feeling confident that I knew your book, I failed the exam.

After using your book for my third exam, I have had enough. I have taken and passed (on the first attempt) the Administration and Advanced Administration exams using your book, but each exam I took asked questions about topics that weren't even mentioned in your book. I have grown tired of walking into the exam KNOWING that my preparation is incomplete due to my study guide.

I plan on posting this letter to Amazon.com in hopes that I can wave off people from purchasing this book.

I'd suggest that before you plan to release a book to help people study for an exam, try to make it cover ALL the topics covered in the exam.

Sincerely,

Greg Troyan I.S. Administrator

I originally bought this book in the 'optimistic' hope that this would give complete coverage or at least coverage enough to prepare for my CNE5.

It does feature each of the exams you'd need, but important chunks are missing.

You can pass the initial NetWare 5 Administration exam, but I doubt you'd be well advised to take any of the others. The next chapter is Advanced Admin 5 and that's missing at least a chapter covering additional applications such as Border Manager and Groupwise which has made me put back that exam for lack of confidence in the source material here. And on further investigation, it only gets worse from there.

Net Technologies exam 50-632 is, (allegedly), now a very difficult exam, but this book includes nothing on subnetting/supernetting, etc and tries to cover the whole subject, (in relatively big text), in about 84 pages. Not a chance! It seems more to be aiming at the previous exam.

As such I've given up on it and have gone over to the Exam Cram series of books.

In conclusion - although I feel the intentions were good, it's a book which is most useful as a quick reminder before applying a subject you haven't seen in a while - but little else and not what it claims to be.

Do I regret buying it - well no - but I wouldn't now if I had the choice again.

Mark Hodgkinson - CNA MCP.

I studied this book, foolishly thinking that it would prepare me for all six exams. Went into "Netware Admin" exam feeling quite confident and came out having passed only by a small margin. So far, I've reported approximately four inaccuracies to Osborne and (three weeks later) I've received "zero" response from the authors. On page 385, the text states min. free space required for SYS: volume is 150 MB. On page 406, the text contradicts itself by stating minimum SYS: volume space required as 200 MB. And the hits just keep coming and coming...I would not recommend this book to anyone, based on the numerous informational inaccuracies and lack of editorial attention.

made the mistake of sitting the Advanced Admin test with this book alone..... bad move... about 15 or the 72 questions were based on material not covered in the admin and advanced admin sections....stuff on groupwise, border manager, managewise, DSL and FTP. do NOT use this book as a sole reference - fine for the basic concepts but ridiculously inept for the Advanced Admin exam.

I used this book along with two other study guides. The other guides were both more accurate and complete, but reading this first gave me a shorter, and fairly good introduction to the material. It let me know where I needed to study further.

On the down side, whole topics were missing from each of the six sections. This book is a fine starting point, if you have other resources to draw from.

However.

From the cover of the book: "complete coverage of all the required core exams". This is simply not true. This book is not "complete". This book fails to live up to its own claims.

The answers don't always match Novell's answers and guess who is correct. Some tests cover areas that are covered in other sections of the book than the section for that particular test.

I passed the CNA 5 exam but it was only because I used the Novell's Guide to Netware 5 book and the Novell CD documentation to check the errors in this book. In addition to incorrect information there were plenty of really annoying typos, especially in the self tests. The Exam Watch tips are good, I wish there were more of them.

I could not believe it, there are references to MCSE in several different places in this book. (A sloppy cut and paste job from an MCSE guide) Server requirements are from Network 5 beta. Also, test objectives are not clearly defined in this book and the section on printing does not go deep enough into NDPS.

I used this book for the service and support, NDS Impl, and intergrating Windows NT and I passed very well. an average of about 80% on each test. I agree it needs some proper editing. Not as bad as some of my collegues have put down

MCSE, CNE, CCNA

If you aced the test, which one did you ace. This book was written on a Beta version, so how can it prepare you for the exam when the exam is based on the final release version of NetWare 5.