Customer Reviews

MCSE Windows 2000 Professional Study Guide (EXAM 70-210)

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

AS a free lance reviewer I get to read and review hundreds of books and often I find several great books on every subject. Also as a freelance reviewer I never do comparative reviews, my reviews are based solely on the content of each book. This book ranks as one of the best for passing the 70-210 exams and will be a nice addition to my technical library.

The book starts from the beginning with installing, configuring and administration of 2000 professional, then you move to administration of the resources, file & print systems, troubleshooting, optimizing, networking, security and user accounts to make this one of the most complete books on the subject.

Each chapter breaks down the topics in the smaller more understandable sections and gives you exercises to perform along the way to enhance the learning process. There are also questions, labs, a two-minute drill and self-test in each chapter.

The book is also the perfect classroom book, as it seems to be tailored made for instructor lead classes. The book includes a cd-rom with CertTrainer, a lab simulator and ExamSim with adaptive practice exams. Finally there are over 30 minutes of audio material on the cd and also an electronic version of the book included.

The authors have left no stone unturned and have given you a great opportunity to pass the exam the first tie around. The book is priced under $50.00 and on-line you can purchase for less. Whether new the MCSE game or an old hand, this book will have you moving into the new millennium of computing!

I just passed the 710 exam after reading this book. The book covers everything that is on the exam and the CD is a great review tool (The first CD to come with a book that I found useful!) and after that it still makes a good reference tool for work. I read this book twice, did all the questions and practice questions in the book then read the Microsoft 710 Readiness Review Exam - and I was more than ready for the exam. Better than spending $500-$5000's for classes and felt I learned more than any computer review class I have taken. Good luck!

I just finished taking and passing the Professional exam, and I have to say this book is right on in regards to coverage. While I do have some quality hands on with the OS, this book detailed what i should expect on the exam, and covered the material fully. It really filled me in on the holes I had in my knowledge, and helped fill those holes. As a side note- do not skip the CD. I found the CD really helpful...

Microsoft has raised the bar significantly with the MCSE 2000 exams, which has made it much more difficult to study for these exams. Not that the NT track was easy, but if you knew your facts, you would probably pass. Not so with 2000. The Shinder's book not only covers all of the objectives on the Professional exam, but it teaches it all to you in the same manner that Microsoft tests you on it. The exercises, the real-world type questions, and the CD make this a really comprehensive study tool. I passed the exam using this book, and I'm studying for Server now using their book. So far, it's just as good.

This is another great book by the Shinder's and the Syngress team. It covers every objective that is tested on the Microsoft Professional exam, and prepares aspiring 2000 MCSE students for their first test very well. I read the book and passed the exam without any problem at all. I didn't need to read any other books, but I did do all of the labs and exercises at home a few times before attempting the exam.

Tom and Deb Shinder have written many, many books on the Windows 2000 OS and all have been superb. I would recommend this book to MCSE's who are preparing for the Professional exam, educators who teach MCSE classes, and IT professionals who are planning an upgrade or will need to support these machines as clients.

Good Job!

(Well I had to give it one star in order to post this review)

This book is inadequate and inaccurate. Had the information printed in this book been accurate you could probably consider it to be a "Getting Started" type book that introduces you to the basics of Windows 2000 Professional. This book was obviously put together in a rush to meet a marketing deadline. In fact, I consider it dishonest to say the least, if not criminal, to even put a "book" like this on the market and claim it to have 100% coverage for the 70-210 exam (and how it is "Microsoft Approved" beats me!). The answers to the questions are wrong, there are even different answers in the book than on the CD for the same questions! Here are some mistake examples: the switches for WINNT.EXE and WINNT32.EXE are mixed up with each other, they talk about right clicking a file to share, the names of files, tabs and other titles are incorrect, the authors have confused kilobytes and bytes when talking about the size of disk sectors and file sizes, one exercise starts by changing a drive from NTFS to FAT but somehow the exercise changes to changing a drive from FAT to NTFS half way through, System File Checker's and Sigverif.exe's functions and results are confused with each other, bottleneck limits mentioned are incorrect, hardware minimum requirements are wrong, (you'll find different values on different pages for the same item), the content and quality of the "videos" are appalling - they've been added on as an advertisement gimmick - they have no value whatsoever in preparing for the exam ... and the list goes on.

I read this book from cover to cover and was disgusted with the amount of mistakes, inaccuracies and inadequate information - I marked each mistake with a Post-it note until I ran out of notes (after about 50). I read the book for a second time from cover to cover and also checked for the correct information from Windows Help. As I haven't ever taken any MCP tests before I had no idea what the tests were like and relied on the book's CertTrainer and ExamSim questions to give me an idea. I recently took the exam and got the shock of my life when I saw the questions - this book does nothing to prepare you for the exam, the difference between the questions in this book and the actual test are like day and night. Many of the questions in the exam require networking expertise; this book does nothing to prepare you in that area.

Needless to say, I failed the exam miserably and I don't really know what to do now. I knew everything in this book, after taking the exam I realized that the information in the book is even more inaccurate than I had thought and doesn't come close to being adequate. I would appreciate it if somebody could let me know where to find practice tests that actually resemble the real exam.

Unfortunately I had already bought the 70-215 book before completing this book and before realizing what a total disaster it is. I shall throw the 70-215 book away unread - the money wasted buying these books is nothing compared to the time wasted reading them. One other thing, I will never buy anything by these authors again, that's for sure!

The only good thing about this book is the cd-rom which has some nice videos which show you how to do the most important stuff.

The book itself is total rubbish. I do not pretend that technical books are error free but in this book, there is no single chapter which is free of errors. It is totally unacceptable to buy an expensive book which instead of helping you to pass the exam, it will as a matter of fact mislead you!

If I was the author of this book I would ask the publisher to retire it and compensate all the poor souls who bought it.

I passed the exam on the first try with a score of 800 but obviously not thanks to this book but thanks to ExamCram.

I had to give this "thing" a star to post this review, otherwise I wouldn't have given one at all. Confusing, inaccurate, deceptive (especially the tests which ask questions on stuff they do not cover or questions that reference an obsecure line in the chapter).

Pitch this (...) and get something else - anything has to be better than this piece of (...).

Same goes for the rest of Syngress stuff. Save your $.

I'm about half-way through this book and if it weren't used in a class I'm taking, I wouldn't read another page. It was written by 7 people and appears to have been edited by 0. The number of errors is just appalling. And many are so stupid that I can't imagine that anyone other than the author ever read it.

How else to explain "...you do not have to reinstall components after installing a service pack as you did in Windows NT" (p. 107)? Well, of course you never needed to reinstall components after installing a service pack. In WinNT you needed to reinstall the service pack after installing new Windows components. Or "Once you format a disk or portion of the disk, you can set aside all or part of the formatted space as a partition", p. 269. Hello, editor! You format a disk after you partition it, not before. There are dozens of equally egregious errors.

And the questions at the end of the chapters are completely useless. Having just passed the server exam (using a Sybex book, by the way, not the server book in this series), I can tell you that these questions bear not even a passing resemblance to real test questions.

I've got 10 years experience with Windows. I'm just taking the tests to get the cert. Woe unto anyone who doesn't already know this material and tries to learn it from this.

I'd stick with Sybex.

I really wanted to like this book - after all, I invested money and time in it as part of upgrading to Windows 2000 MCSE. There is a lot of good information in it, but the lack of technical precision, and lack of attention to detail is very frustrating in the text of this book. For example, Three different minimum supported memory requirements are given in the first two chapters. One exam watch point calls our attention the fact that Winnt, and Winnt32 switches are different, but then Page 178 gives an example of a Winnt32 command, but it uses all Winnt switches. There are numerous examples in this book of the actual text being a direct contradiction of text elsewhere in the book. I thought there must be posted errata, but upon not finding it on Syngress' web site, I e-mailed their support to ask for this information. However, instead of a response to the questions on the more than 10 direct contradictions I found in the first four chapters, I only received an automated reply with a URL to register. However, since this product was not listed on the page referenced in the URL, so it was not possible to register for support.

Additionally, I needed a reference for many command line tasks I schedule in NT (like updating r-disk information) that just do not appear in this book.

There is a lot of good information, but let the reader beware of the contradictions in details. Read very, very carefully, and when you find contradictions in the text itself, do not expect any support from Syngress.