Customer Reviews

MCSE Windows 2000 Accelerated Study Guide (Exam 70-240) (Book/CD-ROM package)

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

 

 

Very good book to get you up to speed on the 70-240 exam. The material had the subjects on my exam nailed down. The gazillions of practice questions and movies on the CD helped quite a bit. I spent about a month on this book and looked up stuff I need more information on in TechNet. I already bought the Syngress book for the network design test, and expect to pass that one too!

Looking at the reviews from this book, you would think it is the perfect book to study for the Windows 2000 accelerated exam, but I am not as enthusiastic about it. I would still rate it average to above average, but I have some reservations about 5 stars.

My largest reservation with this book is the methodology with which the author's teach. Having written introductory articles and taught classes, the direction taken to explain Active Directory is a bit deplorable. There were moments I had to step back and think about the concepts to stop myself from being confused. Consider this: if an early adopter of Windows 2000 who has programmed against Active Directory needs to go back to the Resource Kit and firm concepts, how confusing could this be to someone who has never touched it?

On the plus side, the book has numerous video lessons (on the CD) along with "real-world" lab exercises. These should help you get through any confusing verbage without too many problems.

One more thing. While I believe this tome to be about average, there is apparently not much competition (looking at reviews of other "error ridden" works). And, despite the sub par teaching style employed in some sections, the audience here is current MCSEs rather than newbies. This alone makes me bump this review up from 3 stars to 4. If the 70-240 exam was available for everyone, I would have to knock this one down a peg or two.

I am currently an NT4 MCSE, and prior to getting this book I had an 1 week cram course for exam 70-240 provided by my company; the class was good but I needed something I could sit down with and go through at a bit slower pace. This book is just what the doctor ordered. I have not seen other books to compare this against, but this has all that I need. The labs and the CD are great. And the format of the book is easy to follow.

I bought this book lately, but like other Syngres Exam Study books, they don't cover well the real exam.

I just passed the exam this week, it was very complex and long enough to make you feel very boring after few hours from starting.

If you are looking to pass the real tough exam, then look else where, such as Sybex Exam Study Guide, which considered more exam-focused study material.

I bought this book a couple of months ago and until recently the book was dust collector on my bookshelf. My decision to buy this book was based on relative good reviews that the book received compared to other study guides for exam 70-240. Now, I'm glad that I picked up this particular study guide. What I needed before I was ready for this book was some kind of overview of all the goodies in Windows 2000, because most of my job related experience was so far limited to W2K member servers in NT 4 domain - no Active Directory, GPO... I recently took five days course, "1560 Updating Support skills from MS Windows NT 4.0 to MS Windows 2000" which helped me to accelerate the whole process of preparation for this exam. Now I can more easily follow the topics in this study guide from Syngress. It covers exam objectives pretty well, I found the writing style somehow 'technical dry' but otherwise clear with no filler paragraphs. Some topics are covered too light however (GPO for example), so you'll probably need some additional source of information (I'm using Books online from Resource Kit, Windows 2000 Active directory from O'Reilly and Inside Windows 2000 Server from New Riders). CD-ROM is surprisingly useful, the only thing I don't like are those barely readable CertCam videos and bonus printable questions with answers immediately following the questions - it would be much better if answers were on a separate page. The organization of the topics is in my opinion the major shortcoming of the book, for example it would be logical to cover DNS before Active Directory and to better resemble real exam structure of four different sections. It's also a shame that after a year publisher didn't care to prepare errata for this book to correct some errors and to further clarify some statements that contradict on the first glance but are correct with proper interpretation, for example; page 41 : Site link bridges have no link cost, because their link cost is a dynamic cost dependent on the links included in the site link bridge. page 145: Like site links, site link bridges have cost and replication schedule attributes. Overall this is a good study guide for exam 70-240 with emphasis on word "guide" - it's not possible to cover all the details in one "tiny" book. You'll need some additional resources and readings. Good luck!

I used it for the exam and it worked for me. The topics are very well explained, and it has all the information and concepts you need as a network planner.

I bought this book about 6 months ago since I need to take the 70-240 exam. It's collected a bit of dust on the shelf since the size of the book is a bit daunting. But, time has been permitting to read through the material. As other reviews here do suggest, the reading IS slow going at times due to the technical writing. It's not so much as difficult to understand literally, but the problem is that the book seems to jump back and forth sometimes when discussing the AD (Active Directory) matter. A new user to AD will find it very hard to stay with the book because the material just doesn't go 1-2-3 in order, imho. Instead of suggesting the reader to "go back and review [topic]", why doesn't the book simply cover the next item in the list? I found this to be distracting enough at times to have to put down the book and do something else for a while to get off the subject. All-in-all, good knowledge for an exam, but a better execution of presentation could have been done with the material.

The book is less than average, if you count on passing with this big volume...you'd rather think 1000 times before doing so. Their is a lot of missing information especially with the infrastructure and active directory stuff...the easy part is NOT missig. Get a set like sybex.

The organization of the book is counter-intuitive and fails to present the information in an order that builds on previous chapters, but the information is accurate and broad in coverage.

I just passed the exam using mostly only this book. There is a lot of material in there and so the book is dense. However, taking it step by step, using the quiz on the CD-Rom after each certtrainer chapter, and taking the simulation exam allowed me to get trough the toughest exam of my MCSE certification. I had started studying with the MS Press book and switched to this one for the on-line content.
Only one negative comment : the quizzes are full of errors, but this is not the case for the simulation exam.
Good luck!