1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Terrible book riddled with errors..., August 25, 2008
This review is from: MCSE 70-293 Exam Cram: Planning and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure (2nd Edition) (Paperback)
I wish there would have been a review for this book before I bought it, but there wasn't. I bought this book to help with studying for the 70-293 exam. I understand that the book is an exam cram....meaning that it is a more abridged version of the exam topics, but this book leaves a lot out. And further more, the exam cram for the 70-291 exam was great.
I am not too sure where to even start. Most of the exam topics in this book are given from a 500 foot overview. Network load balancing and clustering cover about 3 pages in this book...and that is a big topic on the exam.
And the book doesn't read very well either. It reads more like a bulleted list than a book with paragraphs. Each paragraph is seemingly unrelated to the paragraph before it.
Also, the practice exams at the end of the book are terrible. Each practice exam is comprised of 60 questions, which is good as when I am studying for an exam, the more questions you encounter on the material, the better prepared you are. But not with these questions. Some of them where well written, but others were flat out terrible. One question was trying to get at network troubleshooting. The general gist of the question was "Computer A on subnet A cannot talk to computer B on subnet B". The question then goes on for a page and a half as to elaborate on all the troubleshooting that the admin took. The question is then something like "What would be the best tool to use to figure out where the problem is? and the answer is tracert.exe. Ok, do we really need 1.5 pages of troubleshooting that you did to ask a question about tracert?
Another bone of contention that I had with the practice exams were with the questions again. This time, it seemed like there were 10 questions, all back to back (ie... question 11, question 12, etc) that were all the exact same thing. They were the same word for word, and then one piece was changed at the end to make them "different". They were all DNS questions....I understand that you need to come up with 120 questions, but if you are going to make all the questions the same, and least put them in different spots in the practice exam so we aren't reading the same thing over and over. It makes the exam very boring.
But the final straw for me was practice exam #2. I gave up in the middle of it. There was a question on collision and broadcast domains. Throughout the question, the states that "hubs are used to connect the machines". Then it asks what you would use to form the domains. So you pick your answers, and then check it with the answer guide in the back, and find out that you got it wrong. And the explanation says that switches....yada yada.....So in the question he talks about hubs, but then in the answer he talks about switches. They are not the same thing.
Also, many questions were just flat out wrong. You answer them correctly, and then check the answer to find out the book is wrong. Too many times this happened. I finally put the book down and vowed to never pick it up again. Simply because it is terrible and you can't trust the information in it to be correct. Possibly no technical editor was employed?!?
A much better choice is the 70-293 book by Syngress. It is much more complete, and each topic is given anywhere from 50-80 pages.
Do yourself a favor, and buy a different book.
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