McSa/McSe Self-Paced Training Kit: Microsoft Windows 2000 Server, Exam 70-215 - Hardcover

First of all, pop open the champagne bottles and have yourself some caviar... for the first time ever, Microsoft is putting actual MCSE questions in their books! In the past, the Microsoft training kits were notorious for posing essay-style questions while the MCSEs used multiple-choice questions. Evidently, reader feedback has changed their tune, and now a full third of the book is devoted to MCSE/MCSA-style quizzes. The better news is that unlike many study guides, the questions here are fairly hard-hitting; they're not quite up to the difficulty of the exam proper, but they're darn close. Furthermore, each set of questions is broken down by objective, and each answer is gone over in full detail. Did you choose B by mistake? The training guide not only tells you why C is right in a dense paragraph or two, but it explains why B wasn't even close to being right. That alone makes it a valuable study guide.

But the real meat of the book is in the writings and tutorials. The kit walks you through the internals of Windows 2000 Server in a fair amount of detail. If you've used other training kits and found them to be lacking when it came to preparing you for the exam, this kit is different from even the Windows 2000 Professional Guide--it analyzes Win2K fairly closely, going over the boot loading procedure in loving detail, explaining the ins and outs of zone transfers, and discussing permissions as fully as you please. The only section of Win2K that could be said to get the shaft is the comparatively sparse Active Directory section, and even that's a lot more comprehensive than many MCSE guides on the market nowadays.

In fact, that's the problem. Although the MCSE/MCSA exams have been cranking up in toughness over the years, they're still not ever going to ask you for, say, what IrDA is (a bidirectional wireless protocol) or for the WINS/NBT Node Type Code (046). Although the Windows 2000 Server exam is a fairly wide-ranging one and there's a lot of information to pack into any book that'd help get you a passing grade, this book's both wide and deep. As a result, you could well miss a critical exam topic in the flurry of details provided over the course of a thousand pages, or worse, you could waste valuable study time on a topic that you're never going to be tested on in a million years. As a result, you'll definitely pass if you study this book, but you'll have to study it hard to make sure you don't miss anything.

But if you do study it, and study well, you'll pass. That's not a promise that most books can make, but this manages. The complex sections--like remote access, unattended installations, and the boot section--will require a fair amount of rereading to get the gist of things, but once you've cracked down you can burrow into it more than you can in most books.

Another minor problem is that this book is also comparatively low on troubleshooting. It does discuss some of the common problems, of course, and the large (375-page) quiz section in the back definitely helps, but in the end, a lot of MCSE/MCSA questions deal with broken networks and things that need to be fixed. The book tends to focus on how Windows 2000 Server should work, and not on what commonly goes wrong or the errors that novices normally make. Unless you go out of your way to get a lot of hands-on experience--which, of course, you should--you could get tripped up when you encounter your first "Here are the symptoms, now identify the problem" question on the exam.

But still. In the end, this is probably one of the best books that Microsoft has produced for novice-to-intermediate users. If you shell out the shekels for this pile o' pages, you'll get past one of the tougher exams in the MCSE/MCSA arsenal. Highly recommended. --William Steinmetz

Developed by senior editors and content managers at Microsoft Corporation.