Customer Reviews

MCSE Windows XP Professional STUDY GUIDE

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

 

 

I bought this book and another Sybex book (MCSE Windows 2000 Directory Services Design) at about the same time in preparation for these two exams. I am SORELY disappointed in Sybex for these books. I took the Windows XP exam yesterday and failed it. This is not the first time I have failed an exam, but it is the first time that I failed one because my study guide didn't properly cover the material. There are a plethora of problems with this book. First of all, as everyone else has said, the editing is TERRIBLE. I saw a multitude of typos, inconsistencies, and just plain wrong answers! Also, the CD that comes with the book makes a good coaster; don't use it for the test. I scored over 90% on most of the exams on the CD, then when I went to take the test, I said, "Hmmm...I've never seen THAT before..." (referring to the book's lack of coverage of the new GPUPDATE.EXE vs. the old SECEDIT.EXE amongst other things). Also, the Adaptive Test that comes on the CD is totally useless because it scores some of your answers wrong even if they are right. (Anybody see any problems with this?!)

I had never bought a Sybex guide before; I am not likely to purchase one again, despite their generally good reputation. Life is too short for me to spend [money] and two weeks on a useless study guide. I only gave the damn thing 2 stars because it DOES teach about Windows XP, just not what you need for the test. Isn't that nice? I'm just glad I hadn't wasted 4 hours and [money] taking the Design test yet...I know to read another book first. (Check out the reviews for the Design book...it's even worse than this one.)

This is the worst SYBEX book I have ever purchased (out of 12). Yes I do believe I cought an "occasional error" it falls somewhere between page 1 and 786. The typos are embarrassing and too many to point out, was the editor on vacation when this was going to print. I only blame Lisa Donald and James Chellis, the authors, and WILL avoid their future books, sorry guys, your names are on the hard cover. I also do not appreciate the lack of authors emails or an email to send feedback to for the book. In closing can I get a refund? Very, very disapointed,

I studied this book for about two months and then purchased the
transcenders for the 70-270 and failed. The book was a broad over view of the Operating system. But does not go deep enough for you to pass this exam. Allot of the things that were focused on in the book are not even on the actual exam!! If you want to pass this exam find a different study guide. I highly recommend using the transceders also!

If you are buying this guide as your sole sorce of info for the 70-270 exam, you are in trouble. While this guide does a fair job of covering the objectives, it does not provide the in-depth information needed to pass this exam. Also, the questions included on the CD do not begin to approach the Microsoft test's in difficulty. If you couple this guide with the Resource Kit (read it cover to cover) and a LOT of hands-on with XP, you have a good chance, but this book by itself will not prepare you adequately for the exam.

I would not recommend this book to anyone trying to learn Windows XP or prepare for the 70-270 exam. The authors took their Windows 2000 study guide and updated it to reflect changes in Windows XP, which is understandable given that the majority of the material is equally applicable to either operating system. However, they're editing is so sloppy it is ridiculous. A simple search and replace could have fixed some of the mistakes they overlooked.

If you need a book to teach you Windows XP, the editing mistakes will most likely leave you either confused about some topics or, worse yet, with an inaccurate understanding of the topic.

If you are already familiar with 2000/XP and are looking for a resource to help you prep for the test, the numerous editing mistakes will leave you so annoyed and/or frustrated that you most likely will stop reading it.

A couple examples of editing mistakes:

Chapter 3 is titled "Upgrading to Windows 2000 Professional"

Chapter 4 explains that regedit has replaced regedt32 as the primary tool for editing the registry but lists regedt32 (not regedit) as a "key term" to remember at the end of the chapter.

Having read many MCSE books, this one is by far the worst. From incorrect and error prone 'Tests', to repeated and constant references to Windows 2000, when it should have read Windows XP, leaves me to believe that this book was rushed to the printers before anyone had proof read it.

I would not recommend this book to anyone seriously studying for their MCSE. The errors are too many to overcome.

This book is riddled with typos and technical errors. This is not the book you want to prepare you for the 70-270 exam. Even the CD that ships with the book is loaded with errors and programming mistakes. Should you purchase the book, Sybex will replace your CD with an updated one that includes a new version of the book in a soft-copy, but it's not worth it. Don't waste your money.

This book is FULL of errors.

On one page it lists NT 3.51 as an OS that you can directly upgrade to XP with, and for the rest of the book it doesn't!

One of the chapters is also entitled "Upgrading to Windows 2000"...an obvious mistake they made when copying and pasting stuff from their other books...very sloppy work.

Even the first few pages have sentences without any spaces between the words! The chapter review tests also have errors in them.

If I were a novice who hadn't had any experience with the previous NT based client OS's (Win2k and NT4) then I would get very frustrated with this book...in the end there are only a couple of minor changes from Windows 2000 which will be tested on anyway.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how certain publisher are constantly producing high quality IT Certification study material on a consistent basis. Sybex is one of the publisher I used to obtain my CCNA and CCDA certification and now that I am pursuing my MCSA I have once again look to Sybex for help.

Windows XP Professional, Microsoft's newest Operating System, is certainly a new challenge and the 70-270 exam is certainly challenging as well. In this 780 page book I found over 90 exercises to help me make the XP exam easier to prepare for.

The authors have also included exam notes and warnings to give me the best shot of passing the exam first time around. As with most XP books this manual starts you off with the install, configuration and upgrading to XP Professional.

You then move to desktop configuration and management with setting up user groups, accounts, policies and security. Disk management does coverage conversions to other disk formats including EFS, compression and NTFS with permissions and rights.

The author spend several chapters having you work with networking concepts, protocols, remote access, VPN technologies and unlike some other books there is also troubleshooting of networks as well as printer and printing.

Finally disaster and system recovery techniques are included, making this about as complete a book as I have seen so far. The cd included has the e-book for both the pc and for the palm. It also comes with tests that are customizable and once again Sybex goes the extra mile and gives you 2 bonus exams

I am impressed with everything included and the fact that they also included WinSim and XP simulation software. About the only thing that isn't included is the answers to the actual test, but if you spend the right amount of time that should no problem.

After having read the comments on the first edition, I wondered if the authors made any improvements that makes buying this book worthwhile. Unfortunately, the answer is no. Although most of the spelling errors are gone, the book fails to meet my expectations for several reasons:

- The content is sometimes flawed. That is a bad thing for a book, which pretends to be useful for exam preparations. See e.g. Chapter 11, answer to review question 2: "You can't provide drivers for Windows 3.1 clients." Now check out the answer to review question 11: "In Windows XP, you can also specify (and provide) print drivers for Windows 95/98 clients, Windows NT 3.1 clients etc etc etc". Once again, I had to check out the Microsoft site (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/learnmore/printershare.mspx), which I believe is indispensable when preparing for your exams anyways.
- The content is so obviously adapted from a Windows 2000 exam preparation guide, that people working with Windows 2000 on a day-to-day basis are only sparsely offered new XP material. Look at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/evaluation/whyupgrade/featurecomp.mspx. See that list of new features? Why is only a handful of those topics covered in this book? What about all the new cool command line utilities, which makes scripting so much easier for admins (which in my humble opinion are the ones required to take the exams)? Why not dig deep into those things? It's an XP book for crying out loud!
- The review questions are questionable, to say the least. If you are going to ask me on what tab I can find a certain button, or if the offline file checkbox is called "allow offline files", "activate offline files", "permit offline files" or "none of the above", you really don't understand the concept of review questions. Besides, review questions are supposed to be used to review content discussed earlier, not to introduce new concepts.
- More references to other sites wouldn't have hurt. There are so many good knowledge base articles, book, Microsoft whitepapers etc. which clarify what the authors try to convey, that I think it's a shame only a handful of references are included.

To sum it all up: 2 stars. Not impressive.