Rating: 
Summary: Not so great !
Review: First of all, This book is suppose to prepare you for the 70-240 Windows 2000 exam.I fell that to many important material like DNS, AD, Ris are not covered in detail. Be carefull there is a lot of typo and mistake in this Exam Prep ! Use other references liky the Ressource Kit and other Core Exam Guide for a good preparation.
Rating: 
Summary: Accelarted pass the pack.
Review: For those planning the short path to MCSE 2000 success that means passing the exam 70-240. With the understanding that you get one shot to pass and if you fail you must complete the entire MCSE 2000 track. So if there was a reference manual to learn from you chances of success go up - well Coriolis has come to the rescue. Completely shredding the exam objective for exam 70-240, this would have to be one of the best books for first time passing I have ever seen. 800 pages packed with diagrams, table figures, questions practice examples as well as exam tip and real world projects, and if you're like me hands-on is so much easier to comprehend the subject matter. The book takes you right from the beginning with a 2000 overview and then right into installation and setup. You then move to DNS and active directory services. This is then followed up by Chapter 5, which has you designing and configuring your first domain. Active Directory admin is next and then on to replication. All this then moves into advanced section of active directory and management and administration of 2000 and the 2000 file system. Learning about user and group policies, software deployment, remote access and terminal service bring you to chapter 17. Just when you think you have had enough you then move on to topics like disaster recovery, 2000 migration, 2000 network security and finally 2000 professional. At this point you might have a headache from all the brain food you have just ingested but there's more. Each chapter has review questions and there is also a cd-rom with exam question and the unique thing about these question is that they are exclusively for the 70-240 exam and you can't find them on any other exam prep or exam cram product. The cd was easy to install and no major hardware complications were encountered. The practice exams are designed to the Microsoft testing formats of drag & drop, tree priority and list priority. Overall this book is going to make a great number of people very happy, and you can be one of them.
Rating:
Summary: Too many errors to be truly useful
Review: I did not want to have to read the MSPress 240 exam book which weighs in at over 1300 pages. This book is about half the pages and given I hasve been using this product for almost 2 years now since Beta, I felt comfortable with the slimmed down version. However, this book has way too many errors to be useful. There is not enough detail about RIS or unattended installs. I have heard a good deal of the 240 exam is on this. It does not even tell the reader to register the RIS server in DHCP. The review questions are not always covered in the chapter so you do not know where to look for the correct answers. Great concept but unfortunatelely in the MCSE arena, 3rd party books are usually poor. It is back to MSPress for me. I cannot risk failing this test using this unedited text.
Rating:
Summary: Great detail on Active Directory
Review: I found this book to be very detailed in respect to Active Directory which is the main reason for purchasing a book on windows 2k. I passed the 70-240 exam and I have this book to thank for it. Thanks!
Rating: 
Summary: Inferior reference
Review: I know the authors worked hard to assemble the information, but the volume of work makes it difficult to accurately write a book of this magnitude. (4 exams in one) It shows. The book was so replete with errors, technical inaccuracies, omissions and irrelevant material, I stopped reading around chapter 5 and used the MS self-paced book. But all that's moot anyway - any preparation material for the 70-240 exam is rendered irrelevant after Dec 31, 2001.
Rating:
Summary: Do NOT buy this book!
Review: I purchased this reference plus the Exam Cram Core for Windows 2000. This reference is full of errors. Portions of the exam are correctly assembling lists. The exam does not fully function and has several errors and incorrect answers. I brought them to Exam Cram's attention in Feb. 2001. No updates have been issued nor replacements for the defective product. They have basically ignored the issues. I have swore off using any ExamCram products.
Rating:
Summary: Inferior reference
Review: I read this book first on my path to become a Windows 2000 MCSE and it has a lot of good material, particularly on Active Directory. However with less than 700 pages of study text I felt for me it would have not been enough info for the exams. There is almost no coverage on certificate services or ipsec, and very little on rras which is very important. Disk management is not covered in enough detail either in my opinion. Yet the book went into great detail on Active Directory Schema details and Active Directory Connector in chapters 9 and 10 of which I did not see anything on my exams - those chapters can be virtually skipped. I will say that the end of chapter Real-World Projects are very usefull lab exercises. Although I found this book to be a great first read on Windows 2000 Server, I would not recommend that anyone use it alone to try to pass 70-240. In conjunction with Microsoft website, technet, white papers, and online practice exams it might be possible to pull it off if you are going to try to upgrade on the cheap.
Rating: 
Summary: The Book is OK-- Don't Bother With The CD
Review: I used this book as a primary study guide for 70-240 and passed. This book gives excellent coverage of Active Directory and Win2K Server, but it tails off disappointingly on Networking and Win2K Pro. I'd suggest using the Win2K Pro Exam Cram as a supplement as well as the MS Win2K Core Networking Guide (or read the Win2K Networking sections in TechNet if you have access to the TechNet CD). The exam that I took focused very heavily on Group Policy Objects, Active Directory maintenance, AD backup and recovery, DNS, DHCP, and Win2K installation methods(RIS, sysprep, unattended network installations, etc). Learn this stuff in great detail! The exam on the companion CD is worthless -- don't waste your time with it. It does not question at the depth and scope required to pass 70-240 and it is full of errors. There is no substitute for Transcender. Get the "Core Four" and don't try to memorize the answers -- instead read and understand the explanations for the questions that you miss or are unsure of. It is equally important to understand that you need hands-on experience with both the Server and Pro products so, if at all possible, set up a home lab with two computers on a network (using a simple 5 port hub). Install the evaluation copies of Win2K Server and Win2K Pro, set up an mini AD domain and play around with DHCP, Terminal Server, DNS, etc. About 50% of the test questions that I encountered were scenario-based so hands on experience with the system is a must!
Rating:
Summary: Great detail on selected issues but not balanced!
Review: Just passed the 70-240. This book hardly helped at all. I found the Sybex one much better - used it for all my revision followed by a Wave boot camp and would recommend the same to anyone else. I'd agree with others who said this book was rushed out and has many errors in it. But my main point is that the content does not really match what they ask you in the exam - important topics are skimmed over and less important ones are given too much depth.
Rating: 
Summary: Well organized preparation tool.
Review: The structure of the book avoided duplicate information. Covers all four components of the exam in enough detail. It saves many pages of reading, compared to reading four separate books. The questions were the primary negative that I found, since they lacked the complexity needed to prepare for the exam.
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