A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Comprehensive

Customer Reviews

• Good info, poor organization.  Jul 19, 2000 (20 of 21 found this helpful)

  I have used "A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC : Comprehensive" to study for A+ certification, to teach from as a textbook, and to develop a course using it as the text. It has strengths and weaknesses.

  The main strength is the ease for which information is accessed.

  By showing the A+ Exam objectives in the front matter and referencing each objective to specific pages as well as referencing the text in the margins, it makes it simple to study each objective individually.

  The weaknesses become apparent when you try to use it as a study text for the A+ Certification Exam.

  Though the exam objectives are referenced and noted on each page, the information is widely dispersed throughout the book. It becomes difficult trying to study while paging through the book to find related information. The A+ Certification Exam is divided into a "Core" exam and a "DOS/Windows" exam. "A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC : Comprehensive" does not use this division.

  To study for A+ you need to study from several sources. I would recommend "A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC : Comprehensive" as an adjunct source but not as a main source of study material.

• Everything you need to know for the A+ exam!  Jun 10, 2000 (12 of 12 found this helpful)

  Like many others, I was assigned this book as part of a training course, and didn't expect much out of it. Was I wrong! This book is crammed with detailed information about hardware and the DOS/Windows operating systems. My preparation for the A+ exams included my one-week class, several of the online quizzes available via the Internet, and reading this book cover to cover like a novel.The result? 92% on the hardware section and 93% on the DOS/Windows portion.The author also includes an entire chapter devoted to Windows NT, which will be useful for future versions of the A+ exam. I continue to use this book as a reference tool, and expect to for many years to come.

• Good book, but needs improvement  Apr 4, 2007 (7 of 8 found this helpful)

  I, like so many others, was required to have this book for two of my classes. While it is a very informative, useful book, it is not very well-organized and is very boring. The videos on the CD that comes with it is very helpful to understand a lot of the hands-on stuff. Many of the "Reviewing the Basics" questions at the end of the chapter cover a lot of pointless things that are not necessary to know, and there are always anywhere from 1 - 5 questions that I just absolutely cannot find the answers to. There have also been many things that a few of my PC tech teachers have found in the book that they would like to debate with the author about. Overall, it's still a good book, but you need a LOT of time and a LOT of patience, and you can't be the type that gets bored too easily with reading, to be able to successfully read this book. The only exception to these rules is if you are required by your teacher to have this book for class. :P

• The book can explain you the fundamental of PC.  Jul 15, 2001 (3 of 3 found this helpful)

  The book has 19 chapters and 7 appendixes. Chapters cover introduction to computer software, hardware, multimedia technology, viruses and as well as networking. In the appendixes you will find about ASCII Character Set, ANSI.SYS, The Hexadecimal number system and etc. Briefly this book is really handy one and written about mostly hardware components. When you read you will see it by yourself how handy it is. So i would say if you need basic computer reference then buy the book. Good Luck.

• Not a good book to get A+ certified.  Oct 15, 2008 (5 of 6 found this helpful)

  I bought this book as a requirement for my A+ Essentials college course. I passed my college course with an A as well all my past classes. I could not pass the certification exam. Its simple:
  This book says way to much and teaches you little in terms of taking the cert. exam.
  There is no separation in the software and hardware parts of the exams as descrived by the professor in the top thread.
  Questions asked in the 2007 certification exams where not even covered in the chapters we were actually able to cover.
  We could not even cover one chapter per class since the chapters were so huge. As descrived above this book could have been writen in half the pages that contains.
  As an A student that has really tried...do not buy this book.