How to Research IT Certification Study Material

Ed reveals the secret to productive  IT cert and training research in this response to a Tom IT Pro reader's inquiry.

Tom's IT Pro Reader:

Mr. Tittel, I’m an IT Manager for a company in Orange County, NY. I started my IT professional life about six years ago with a stint at Geek Squad for about two years and then went on to graduate with my Associate’s degree in Computer Science, with a strong focus on Networking and COBOL/VB programming. I took a class in college that got me the Network + and A+ certification. I’m currently scheduled to retake the Network + exam, because I graduated in 2005 and I figured new technologies had come of age since 2005. I also took a class in CCNA but never took the test after completing the class to get the certificate.

I was wondering what you recommend in terms of certifications of reading material? I’m a pretty savvy learner. I was taught Windows Server 2003 in college, but my current job has Windows Server 2008 R2, so I’m reading a book on that right now.

I want to be successful in this Industry, I’m determined. I just need some insight into the direction and knowledge I should obtain.

Sincerely,

Trevor

IT Manager

Ed Tittel:

Dear Trevor:

You are on the right track, and very much asking the right questions. But instead of pointing you at specific titles for Network+ and Windows Server 2008 (plain-vanilla or R2), I’d like to explain to you how I select books for my own studies, and how I research the best titles for inclusion in various reading lists, bookshelves (like my two-part Information Security bookshelf collection for InformIT.com: see Part 1 and Part 2 of the 2011 edition for something I’m both proud of and happy with along these very lines).

I will also provide some of my favorite titles for both topics for you, of course, but as a member of the “teach a man to fish” school of do-it-yourself learning and professional development, I think it would be helpful to explain how to do this kind of thing any time you need to, perhaps even when you’re venturing into pretty virgin territory.

1. Amazon “Advanced Search” from the Books page is really, really good for separating the wheat from the chaff. But you must use specific exam ID information in the Title or Keywords fields (try either or both approaches and see what turns up), and then also set “Sort Results by:” to “Avg Customer Review” first and foremost. Sometimes I also resort to “Bestselling” if I don’t get enough (or any) decent stuff showing up using the “custreview” setting.
2. Thus, a sample search for Network+ must use the new exam ID (N10-005) and then the “custreview” setting. This turns up three titles, basically, which I list here in their order of appearance, and remark that all of these titles have done right by me in earlier editions, though I have read only the Kevin Wallace book for the N10-005 exam (and like it very much—I’ve reviewed it for PearsonITCertification.com, in fact):
3. In the same vein, I’ll pick the 70-642 “Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Network Infrastructure, configuring” exam for the same treatment, because it is the cornerstone for many of the MCITP credentials that involve this platform. Here’s what I get using the same approach at Amazon:
4. As I look over the 70-642 info, I see that it’s a pretty well-published topic, so that leads me to my next suggestion in winnowing a list of potential materials: books with 5-star reviews are all well and good, but a 5-star book with a single review (as two of them showing are rated) is not as good as a four or 4.5 star book with 10 or more reviews. It’s easy (and common, by getting friends to seed reviews on Amazon) for a single reader to like a book 5 stars’ worth; it’s a lot harder for 10 or more readers to agree that a book really is that good. So now, you can start pruning your list, because you probably don’t want more than one or two books anyway, so as to leave budget for practice exams and the cost of “the real thing” (the actual N10-005 costs around $250 depending on whether or not your employer is a CompTIA company).
5. Next, after pruning, look for reviews of your candidate books outside the retail chain: in fact, it’s best to search for reviews on study prep, study group, or forum sites where people studying for a specific exam get together to talk about things, share pointers to “good stuff” (very much the best kind of referral you can get), and so forth.
6. Finally, head to your nearest big book store and see if you can find these books on the shelf (I usually hit up my local Barnes & Noble, which is only about three miles from my house, lucky me!). Look them over and see how you like them. It’s important that you like them, because if you don’t like them, you won’t read them with the kind of interest and attention you’ll need to devote to your subject matter, not just to pass the exam you’ll be taking, but also to really learn and master the material to which the exam is related. And in the long run, that learning is what really counts the most!
7. In the longer run it’s a good idea to collect general related books and references in your professional competencies, too, though you may not need this for your exam. Thus, for example, I would strongly recommend that any networking professional pick up and get to know a book like Rich Seifert’s The Switch Book or his equally good Gigabit Ethernet, as well as Charles Spurgeon’s Ethernet: The Definitive Guide or Gilbert Held’s Ethernet Networking. And, in that same vein, any aspiring Windows guy should buy and read Mark Russinovich et al’s fabulous Windows Internals 5 (and then plan to buy and read each new edition as it comes out in the future: I’ve got editions 1, 2, and 5 myself already).
8. For this kind of info, I tend to browse online for graduate level classes on my chosen subject matter, then cherry-pick the best textbooks and reference books I find that way to keep up with the topic. Try spelunking for my now-defunct contributions to www.netperformance.com (try the Internet Wayback Machine with the date set to late October 2007, then dig into reading lists to get to this page where you’ll find what I put together for a whole bunch of topics, including ITIL, database tuning, windows Vista TCP/IP protocol stack, NetFlow, TCP/IP, Queuing Theory, Web Services, VoIP, Probability and Statistics, Web Performance, Grid Computing, Data Visualization, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity, and whole, whole bunch more—a giant collection of “great stuff” if I do say so myself! ;-)

Hope that helps, and thanks for writing: What a great topic!

Best wishes in your career development planning, and in studying for your upcoming cert exams.

Ed Tittel is a 30-year-plus veteran of the computing industry, who’s worked as a programmer, a technical manager, a classroom instructor, a network consultant and a technical evangelist for companies that include Burroughs, Schlumberger, Novell, IBM/Tivoli and NetQoS. He has written and blogged for numerous publications, including Tom's Hardware, and is the author of over 140 computing books with a special emphasis on information security, Web markup languages and development tools, and Windows operating systems.

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