MCSD Training Guide: Solution Architectures (MCSE Training Guide) - Hardcover

Ferguson, Derek; Dayton, Denny; Qaisar, Eeraj J.

3.25

8 ratings by Goodreads

9780735700260: MCSD Training Guide: Solution Architectures (MCSE Training Guide)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0735700265 ISBN 13: 9780735700260

Publisher: Que Pub, 1999

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Each Training Guide will be organized around the exam objectives. This makes it very easy for readers to focus on areas where they need to improve. It also helps them identify what the key topics on the exam will be.

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Review:

The MCSD Solution Architectures Training Guide is a fine, well-thought-out, solidly put together book on software construction. It's thorough--detailing everything that can affect the independent programmer from UI considerations to how to tell whether a company is getting ready to downsize. It even has the rare quality of being enjoyable to read.

There's only one problem: it might not help you pass the test.

While it's a very good introduction to the issues surrounding the MCSD: SA test, the book is a large (600-page) mass of information that lacks a critical focus on the hot spots that routinely come up on tests. The information is, by and large, presented all at once without any weighting, as if every fact were as crucial as every other fact--which, from a test-taker's perspective, is demonstrably not true. In other words, it's an extremely good book, but it doesn't tell you what topics are likely to come up on the MCSD.

That's a shame, because otherwise the book is a wonderful primer. A long case study at the beginning of every chapter details a fictitious company's problems, complete with quotes from imaginary interviews with various executives and end users. The rest of each chapter analyzes the case study. You'll learn to understand what end users really want technology-wise, guess what kind of funding may be available for your project just from careful analysis of senior management's guarded comments, talk to the IT guy, and learn what challenges lie ahead.

Scalability requirements are covered, as are user interface design, project scope, the basics of database design and normalization, n-tier computing, ROI calculations, the PASS ME analysis that all software projects should be subjected to, and conceptual design of a project.

But still, the book seems to be somewhat clueless about what comes up on the test--"Because the 70-100 exam is about designing solutions and because Microsoft has a published framework for solutions design, it seems reasonable to suggest that you do some background research on this topic in MSDN...."--but there's no further information on the topic, which indicates that the authors are unclear on what will be tested.

The end-of-chapter exams are extremely thorough, as usual for this series, and does help to mitigate some of the underlying problems, as does the ExamGear software, known for its reasonably brutal sample questions. But a nagging worry about whether these were the types of questions that would show up on the exam haunted me.

As I mentioned earlier, this is an outstanding book with a major flaw. If you're buying two books to prepare for the MCSD, this should definitely be one of them. But if you're buying one book, this might not be it. --William Steinmetz

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