A+: Core Module Study Guide (Certification Study Guide 0)

At first glance, the book does have a few drawbacks. Some information is out of date: SCSI-3 long ago progressed beyond the proposal phase, and there's no mention of Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics (EIDE) disks, DVD drives, or universal serial bus (USB) ports here. Plug and Play is treated in these pages like the shaky new technology it was several years ago. The Pentium II CPU gets only cursory coverage, and there's no mention of Celeron. AMD and Cyrix--the companies--get brief nods, but the chips they make are not addressed separately. Also, the accompanying CD-ROM could have been a better learning tool (the test simulator has a kind of clunky interface and it doesn't provide answer discussions or references to the text).

Component and CD-ROM details aside, though, A+: Core Module Study Guide provides a solid introduction to the general operation and key subsystems of IBM- compatible personal computers. Readers get the goods on electronic theory, volatile and nonvolatile memory, processors, peripheral buses, printers, and networks. A key feature is the in-depth coverage of isolate-and-test strategies that are essential to effective troubleshooting; readers find out how the various subsystems work together and are taught to diagnose a multitude of system failures. The book even includes trade information, detailing how to treat customers respectfully and how to work safely. And each chapter of the book concludes with multiple-choice questions, the answers to which appear in an appendix. --David Wall