Great value deal
I'm currently studying to get my certified professional developer degree. Its a good deal and it comes with everything i need for the web developer certification.
helpful for MS exams
Very helpful for taking Microsoft exam. I have passed successfully due to these books. But experience is still necessary.
Boring book, but what else are you going to get?
Unfortunately, there really isn't much material out there that covers the MCPD certifications. In fact, based on my brief search, this was the only book that covered it. So it was either get this book or just go off the list of material posted on the Microsoft website. The book does provide three 15% off vouchers and a program of test questions. And for that, it gets the +2 stars.
After that, the material is pretty weak. It's written as-is (kinda ben stein-ish) and the code is confusing to read. I often times have to look at the MSDN equivalent material to get a better understanding of what the author was really trying to say and/or code. But again, what are you going to do? The list that microsoft presents on their certifications page is too vague, you need direction.
You're going to definately need more material to look through outside of what's in the book, but it's a good place to build from. So far I have just taken 1 out of the 3 tests, but I passed on my first time. If you were to use the book as a guide, shouldn't be a problem to do the same.
Good test prep, but otherwise sparse content
Reading these books, I find them to be good resources for preparing for the exams, but I know that they will not become the trusted dog-eared references that I would have hoped them to be. Useful content is sparse; a lot of text seems to be wrapped up in the presentation of the material and it leaves it a little verbose. Furthermore, the books are badly edited and I find myself distracted by the flagrant mistakes that one can find every couple of pages. The mistakes do not seem to be so bad, however, that one cannot easily discover the error and compensate; they are also seldom technical in origin, though the (more often) grammatical mistakes or the (occasional) omitted negation *could* lead one to misconstrue the meaning of a particular passage.
I have been exceptionally upset on the occasion when I discovered an obvious case of text pasted from another section of the book that had not been properly modified for the new context, and so, badly referred to the old context. This is just careless.
Aside from this, the material is otherwise very clear and very simply put.
Great books for step by step learning.
I found these books very helpful. Most of the topics are very well explained and are related to the exam.
(11 reviews)
