Study Aids

My usual study routine for exams comprises of several sources a mix of books and sometimes video content plus obviously labbing the exam like crazy.

I tend to buy at least two books on the subject and for microsoft exams that is usually the associated MS press book and the exam cram or sybex manual, for video training I’ve only ever bought items from CBT nuggets, whilst rather pricey they can be a great help, especially for studying whilst cooking or doing other mind numbing chores.

You can also download evaluation versions of pretty much any OS or software that you need to study for the exams. At the moment the software is loaded onto my 2 ESXI servers but you can get the same effect by employing something like sun’s virtualbox or vmware server on your own pc/laptop if you like. However if you are looking to make a habit out of tech certifications I would suggest that you invest in at least one vmware ESXI compatible server. You dont need to spend much to actually get a server capable of running vmware esxi, My servers are Dell SC440′s which brand new cost around two hundred and fifty notes, so a second hand one should be very reasonable indeed, max them out with as much ram as possible and a couple of 500GB disks and a vmware lab you shall have.

I also purchase practice exams from either measureup or transcender to help me gauge how ready I am for the actual exam. Although as with all practice questions they are only useful the first time you see each question, so do not go overusing them otherwise your practice results will be skewed by remembered questions on previous attempts.