Description:
If your goal is to be an independent technical worker of any kind, it's generally accepted that you'll need at least one major certification. A lot of organizations that hire contractors look for a recognized certification as a preliminary qualification for a job, so you need some sort of certification in order to be taken seriously. Get Certified & Get Ahead provides some information about the various computer and networking certifications available, shares a lot of advice on why getting certified is a good idea, and tells how you can use your certification to maximum effect. This would be a better book if it went into greater detail on the various professional certifications available to information technology workers. Author Anne Martinez is both a Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) and a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE), but she barely touches on the purposes (much less the requirements) of each of these popular and valuable certifications. Instead, she devotes half of this book to soft (and too often obvious) information, such as how to study, shop for training services, and advertise your qualifications on your Web site. The other half of this book is a directory of companies and the certifications they offer, with brief statements of what each is meant to prove, how much testing costs, what prerequisites exist, and where information appears on the Web. It's a mixed bag, but mostly these pages compile material that's freely available on the Web. --David Wall Topics covered: Computer and networking certification, with emphasis on how and why you should pursue it. There's information on how to decide which certification is best for you, how to select training and secure financing, and how to study for technical exams. There's also a decent directory of companies and their certifications (it has many entries, but individually they're too brief and lack sufficient detail).
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