Customer Reviews

Network+ Certification Study Guide, Second Edition

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2 star:		(1)
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Network+ is fast becoming necessary certification to gain employment as a basic network technician. This manual does cover the exam objectives, however there are needed improvements, especially in the grammar and typos.

The book does have over 50 exercises to work with and topics like basic network concepts, topologies, operating systems, protocols, the OSI model media and hardware start off the book. I didn't see any coverage of wireless technologies.

Also included is over 125 pages devoted to TCP/IP and there are 12 exercises which so far of the books I have seen, is the most coverage for the network+ exam. I like the author's breakdown of security and his troubleshooting techniques are also very good.

The book comes with a cdrom which has CertTrainer, a cbt review of the exam topics and objectives. Also ExamSim, a practice exam simulator with over 200 questions, plus over 200 in the book. The cd contains a complete e-book of the entire manual.

This book could be a self study or classroom manual and with a few improvements the book would make an excellent reference

Unfortunately the book came wrapped up in plastic, so I couldn't see the contents of it. And I bought it at a book store before checking the reviews on Amazon.com. If I could do it all over again, I definintely would not buy this book.

Overall, the book covers a lot of the content for the exam, but is woefully lacking on the recent additions to the N10-003. These topics include Wireless information including the speeds, the standards, etc, all of the Appletalk protocol information, Bluetooth, a bunch of different fiber optic standards such as 10BaseFL, 100BaseFX, 10GbE 10 gigabit over ethernet, IP v6 just to name a few.

The other thing that I noticed is that the book is laregly based around outdated OSes. Whenever they talk about client configuration, it is always based on Win95/98, and server configuration is based on Windows NT 4. They show how to configure these OSes and the different screens that accompany them. They very lightly touch on Windows 2000. They other thing that bugged me early on in the book is how they made reference to Windows XP Server. I have never heard of Windows XP as a server, it is only a client OS. There wasn't even an acknowledgement that Windows 2003 Server was even invented.

Now we will move onto the questions that the use at the end of the chapters to test your knowledge. The big problem with all of these questions are that they are vague. They don't have clear answers, and many of the times they won't even specify how many answers they are looking for. So you will pick one answer, and find out after that they were looking for two. Or the question will be worded as they are looking for multiple answers, but then will only be looking for one.

Another question that bugged me went something like this... "You are an administrator for a network that has multiple physical buildings, you are having problems connecting to a server at the opposite building, what do you do first?"
One of the answers was to trying pining the server, but according to this book, the correct answer was to call the phone company, because the problem was with the leased line. This is complete BS, the real answer should have been to run a tracert to determine where the problem was coming from. Was it really a problem with the leased line? Or was your router down? The question really didn't give enough information to answer it correctly.

Now onto the enclosed CD of questions.....don't even use it. It will just make you feel dumb as all of the questions are vuagely worded, and the software looks like a 10 year old designed it. I answered about three questions before I pulled it out, and put it away.

Other complaints about this book that I don't go into detail are:
Some of the topics were not explained well at all.
There is a lot of repitition, espcially in the TCP/IP areas....

Once I learnded that this book left out a ton of knowledge, I picked up Mike Meyer's Certification Passport for Network+ Second Edition....guess what? He covers the material on the exam. There is a big section on Wireless, and covers the gigabit ethernet stuff.....

Overall, this book is ok for reference, but for studying, and learning for N10-003, I would say skip it and get a better book. I give it two stars because it does cover a broad area of networking stuff, just leaves out the recent important stuff.