Disappointed
I bought the MCITP Enterprise Administrator bundle which included this book. This was the second one I read in preparing for my certification. Overall not bad it goes into some detail on important key AD features. There was some incorrect information and mispellings throughout the whole book. I noticed this within the first 2 chapters. I even looked it up and Microsoft has a web page dedicated to the incorrect data. Including incorrect answers to questions they ask. The other portion that was lacking was the AD LS/CS/FS/RMS chapters. They each had one chapter and for ADFS and ADRMS overview that may be ok. However, they did not cover details on AD LS that was on the test and the AD CS chapter which is 13% of the test was really lacking. It went over some walk throughs for installs and setups, but did not cover much of the details needed for the exam. I recommend reading the book for the exam, but use other resources as well for the AD LS/CS/RMS/FS.
Good for operation, not for certification
While it is sold as a certification reference, I don't advise others to try to use this book for test preparation. The book was obviously rushed and incorrect in a lot of the test related sections, and the accompanying disk with prep tests asks questions that are not even addressed in the book. Also the disk does not allow you to take focused tests based on specific chapters, just generic lesson 'area' like 'DNS Configuration'. Real world application isn't bad though and the information can be helpful in actual work related issues. Just be ready when several of the command line instructions don't work as advertised.
Bottom line is while I use it to help with some related server info, I had to rely on other material for the test due the books poor preparation.
Detail...
This is a good book with lots of details. I wish I have more time to study it.
Ed
Good book, lots of typo'd/wrong commands
The good: The book quickly dispenses what you need to know for the exam, then tells you what you need to survive in the real world. I.e. Powershell and scripting. Coming from a 20,000+ user environment it is refreshing to see a book actually written for the "real world".
The bad: I'm only through the first four chapters, and oddly enough I find myself actually doing the examples. To my surprise, about one in ten commands is flat out wrong. Parameters are specified that aren't part of the program being executed (p.122), PowerShell commands that are typo'd bad enough to throw errors that would be undecipherable to most people (p.127), etc.
And no, despite the fact that they show it about 20x, you cannot use %username% from the command line to set a variable with dsmod as they show it, since it uses the logged in users' username (the admin running the command).
If they would have proof read and tested these commands before throwing them in the book it likely would have raised by rating of this book to a five. However, it's hard to overlook such glaringly obvious and *frequent* errors. I hope the other books in this series aren't as bad in this department.
Excellent resource!!!
This book is an excellent resource to assist in preparing for test 70-640. Well written and very understandable. Delievery of the product was also great, and actually MUCH faster than I had anticipated.
