Customer Reviews

MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-562): Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5 ASP.NET Application Development (Pro - Certification)

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

 

 

Well, I just took and passed the 70-562 exam. This book was my only written source for the exam. I also looked up things on MSDN once in a while. I found the book to be very well organized and informative, and will keep it as a handy reference on .NET Framework 3.5. I read the entire book and completed most of the exercises and answered all the questions at the end, though I didn't complete the suggested practices. If I had, I would have never finished the book.

As far as the test is concerned, if you use this book and nothing else, I can almost guarantee you will not pass the test. A lot of the questions on the test are mostly related to remembering which XML configuration tags to use for specific situations. The questions at the end of the chapters on this book are good but will not help you on the test. I honestly don't know why the authors do that, but I digress... My suggestion is that you supplement this book with Transcender or MeasureUp. I used Transcender and some of the questions on the test were similar to the questions on Transcender, but not many. I didn't use MeasureUp so I can't comment on how effective it is. I had previously taken and passed the 70-536 exam and Transcender was of great help, that amount of help did not apply to exam 70-562.

70-562 is way harder than 70-536. The former had 50 questions, whereas the latter only 40. They give you 3 and a half hours to complete the 70-562 test so that should give you some idea.

I wish you good luck because you are going to need it.

I read the book for exam 70-528 first, which is for ASP.NET 2.0. It is nicely written and I am pretty happy about it. This new book for exam 70-562 rearranged some chapters and reformatted the text in addition to adding AJAX and LINQ. In the new book headings, the property names are all upper cases, which are really hard to read. For example, RowStateFilter property is displayed as ROWSTATEFILTER. Also, some examples in early chapters uses the GridView control, which is not covered until Chapter 8. I feel that the key points of each topic could have been better organized.

This book provides a good foundation to take the exam, but I would strongly recommend that you use this book (and its CD with practice exams) in conjunction with other practice tests (such as Measure Up).

There are a number of 'holes' in the book that come to light whilst going through practice exams, but these are easily filled via google/MSDN.

Although this book covers the main topics for exam 70-562, it fails miserably in providing adequate, in-depth code examples of the kind needed to actually pass the exam.
The book could do with less wordiness and include more actual examples of code and showing examples of different methods to achieve the objectives of the book.
The test questions are nowhere near close to the actual test questions. The test questions from the book cover basic concepts, whereas the actual test questions are MUCH more code intensive; requiring you to understand not only the concepts but the intricate details of implementing those concepts.
You would be much better served by purchasing one of the exam prep packages sold by companies like Self-Test software combined with studing examples from MSDN if you really want help passing this exam.

I found this book was another excellent exam preparation publication from Microsoft Press. This book provides not only more than enough material to pass the actual exam, but the 900+ pages make it a very suitable tool for self defense. ;-)

The number of topics covered are quite broad. Most notably, large portions of the book are dedicated to data sources (e.g. LINQ, XML, SQL, etc.) and their proper use. If you have already read up on ADO.NET, these chapters are a brief summary, but a satisfactory refresher. Web services are also covered reasonably well, mostly from a consuming-client perspective. The remainder of the book covers nearly all topics addressed in the exam objectives in adequate detail. I found that this book alone prepared me well for the test.

As far as error content, there were surprisingly few occurrences. The most notable issue I had was a typo indicating seconds instead of milliseconds. When reading the book, remember that most ASP.NET configuration settings are measured in seconds; AJAX and other client settings are measured in milliseconds.

Overall, I very much enjoyed the book. The accompanying practice tests were, as usual, a little different from the book content, but only slightly. The result of this difference is a little extra reading from the MSDN library, which improves your knowledge for the exam quite nicely. If you don't know why an answer is marked as correct, read-up on it.

I highly recommend this book for anybody who would like to pass the 70-562 exam.

I took a bootcamp class at CED Solutions a few weeks ago and we went through this entire book (doing most of the labs too). I found this book to contain everything I needed to pass the test. There is not a thorough tech bible for your day to day programming needs (just use google!), but you get what you need to pass the tests and get your certification.

I found that this book provided enough information for me to pass the exam but there were several things in the exam that were not covered in the book. This book should not be your only information source. Definitely use MSDN and maybe even another book for additional preparation materials. All-in-all this is a decent book just remember to supplement it. I would probably give it 3 and 1/2 stars if the system allowed that. Also this book includes 2 CDs, 1 of them has a practice exam, the book in digital form, and many other features and extras.

I liked the book and thought the content was good, but I used the ebook and was unable to copy and paste code from the pdf because of the document security. That issue alone made me skip a lot of the lessons and devalued the book in my opinion.

The book has some useful information, however not much of it is relevant to the actual exam. Also, it is not particularly relevant to the way .NET is coded in actual experience. If you want to pass the exam, you will need other materials besides this book. I've been coding .NET since 1.1, and am continually amazed at how out of touch these books are with how professional development teams actually use .NET to create a system. The exams present overly complicated scenarios that would rarely come up in real life. But, they have to sell books and certification exams, so here you are.

This book offers a wide review about main topics, but it hasn't enough references (to other sources) to improve their lessons, I sent a question to its tecnical help support but after 3 week I've not been recived an answer, I hope that you have a better lucky