Customer Reviews

MCSE Training Kit. Microsoft Windows 2000 Accelerated (MCSE Training Kits)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Windows 2000. Windows 2000, Windows 2000. This seems to be the IT phrase of the year and the certification seems to be one of the hardest to attain. Microsoft Press has taken the opportunity to publish on of the foremost extensive books on an exam they created.

There is over 1500 pages, written by Microsoft Engineers, and the book is broken down into 4 parts, 1 is Windows 2000 Professional, 2 is Network Infrastructure, 3 is Active Directory and 4 is 2000 Server. This covers the following exams, 70-210, 70-215, 216, and 217. The first thing this book covers is the requirements of the 70-240 exam and what you need to do and what happens based on your exam results. Each chapter has several lesson and hands=on exercises and review questions to make sure you have a good handle on the material.

One thing to keep in mind is that you can re-do any lesson and work at your pace. The book is well researched and well documented and should make the exam material easier to comprehend.

There are 2 cd-roms included, the first has an 120-day evaluation of 2000 server and the other is filled with supplemental files that correspond to different sections in the book. It might be hard to find a better book on the subject that this one.

As all of the Microsoft series self-paced training kits, this book's value is not only the perfect way it's been written but also the information a Windows 2000 Administrator can find for the every-day tasks that he is asked to perform. Just read it carefully, understand what you read and you will not miss the exam! Keep it on your book-shelves and be sure that you'll need it many times even if you've passed the exam.

This "kit" is not usefull for the accelerated exam. It does have all the information, however it is formatted to teach someone Microsoft technologies from the ground up, instead of teaching a technical person the new features and how they work. Its a waste of time to read 1600+ pages that expalain basic networking such as WINS and routing. All the information is there its just so spread out over so much unneeded material that it is impossible to find without waisting time reading what you should already know to take the acclerated exam. There is not much time left to take this exam, dont waste it reading redundant information. The information in the kit is correct and accurate as far as I can tell, it is just not good material for the acclerated exam.

This is a hefty book. It not only weighs a ton it covers an enormous amount of material. It's hard to believe it was written by a single author. While I agree with some reviewers that it covers much that an MCSE should already know, it doesn't hurt to review the material. Not everyone will have used the same features and skills in their career so covering the basics of some features isn't a bad thing.

The book is fairly well written and has only a few errors and typos, something that other books have in abundance. In fact the test had several errors, more than the book did. I saw one question that I don't remember being covered in the book, so most everything is in there.

I'm still amazed that it took me 3 hours to pass the test, I regularly breeze through these types of tests. But, if you read the whole book and UNDERSTAND everything that it discusses, success on the test is guaranteed. Read the whole thing, DNS DHCP RAS and others are different in Win2K than they were in NT.

Good luck on the test.

I passed 70-240 last week in 3.5+ hours. It was the toughest MS test I have taken yet but it is definately passable. 70-240 is made up of 4 separate tests; Pro, Server, AD, NetInf and this book is broken up in that manner to help you pass. It's 1400 pages of Chapters and you need every page! This book is the most comprehensive I saw and WILL, if read and studied, guarentee you pass. I would not use this exclusivley - I read some Technet articles and stuff, but that was all free. This is all you have to pay for to pass 70-240.

Yes, if you understand most of the materials and you will pass. This is my first MS book that I read. I studied it for 2 month and I just passed the 240. Of course, there is 4-5 questions that are not covered by this book. If you are NT MCSE you should be able to answer those question. Even if you can't, you should still pass cuz there are about 100 questions and getting 6-7 wrong answers won't fail you. This is the only book I used for the that exam. As far as hand on goes, I setup Multi sites/Multi domain AD and E2k for my company.

I give this book 4 stars not 5 because this book is too thick.

The book does a great job of making the reader acquainted with features of Microsoft Windows 2000. I believe that the book easily fulfills its purpose - having read this book, an MCSE with Windows NT 4.0 can easily pass 70-240 Microsoft Windows 2000 Accelerated exam.

The book is divided into 4 sections, just like the 70-240 exam, and fills a good 400 pages for each section! The book does cover stuff in quite detail, but one would definitely find a lot of things that don't belong in this book - for example, teaching the reader to log on to a windows system by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del!

It covered every question that I got on the exam, and much more. After reading the book, a reader would truly feel knowledgeable about Windows 2000.

However, the book is full of redundancies. There are lots of things that are explained in detail in more than one section of the book! Further, some of the simplest of things that existed in Windows ever since Windows 95 came out, are explained in good detail - which certainly is not the job of this book!

All in all, a reasonably good book, if you have the patience to read a huge book with amazing amounts of content, some repeated over a few times.

It seems like they took the full training kit for each exam and arbitrarily deleted sections; with the result, for instance, that it has a practice exercise to configure WINS replication without ever having installed WINS servers. There is also a lot of info in the Network section about how this or that feature is integrated with Active Directory, before you've even touched on Active Directory. And the VPN practice instructs you to right-click Routing Interfaces, when (if you've followed the exercises) you have not configured your server for routing.

The 4 sections are sequenced Professional, Network Infrastructure, Active Directory Server. A more logical sequence would have been Professional (although it is more independent than the other 3), Server, Active Directory, Network Infrastructure. Someone should have at least gone through the book to find all the inconsistent instructions. A better approach would have been to write a completely separate book focusing on new features of Windows 2000, and how the existing features from NT 4 have changed.

This is the only book you need to pass all the MCSA requirements (except for iis, which only makes up for 2 questions on the 218 exam)and THE perfect book to use to pass the MCSE core requirements. Well layed out, thorough this book has it all. For people that find it dry.. my advise find a new career. Running a Microsoft box is the most easiest and straight forward thing in the world compared to solaris/linux/(unix). Yes Win 2k and MMC can be your new best friends that'll help you earn 50k a year. Comes with a copy of Win 2k Server which alone is worth the bookprice.

Certs:
MCSA
A+ and NET+
SCSA
CCNA

This book contains a lot of information about important topics such as DNS and security. However, similar to other Microsoft Press books, it is written in a extremely dry way, and it is not an enjoyable read at all. You may learn something from reading this book if you can stay awake.