Taking 70-270

MrAgent

Ive decided to start on getting a 2003 MCSE.

What are everyones thoughts on the following book?

Amazon.com: MCSA/MCSE Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-270): Installing, Configuring, and Administering Microsoft Windows XP Professional: Installing, Configuring, ... Second Edition (Pro-Certification) (9780735621527): Walter Glenn, Anthony Northrup

It was delivered yesterday. Is this enough to pass the exam?

A little bit about my background.

I have a BS in IT with an emphasis on security, 15 years of IT experience, and I am a current systems engineer working on several large windows enterprise networks.

Should this be an easy exam? I thought security+ was fairly easy.

varelg

I have that book and I am about to take this exam, my plans are to sit it at the end of this month or the first week of november. As far as the book is concerned, nothing beats the original MS Press when preparing for an MS exam. There's a whole of a lot of repetitive text when giving directions in practice exercises and few holes around explanation on the registry and startup that I felt were in a need to be patched from either another MS Press book or from Wikipedia. That's what I noticed so far. The thing with the style of writing is that it's not exactly distiled XP knowledge that you just absorb, the distillation is left to you. Expect to take a decent amount of notes as you study and practice.
Beside the book, I also got the lab workbook for 70-270, I just felt that labbing it makes it stick longer.
It seems that there's no weight posted on the particular 270's exam objectives, I doubt that all are equally important but my guess is that permissions, remote installations and data storage form the crux of the exam questions.
It is taken almost matter-of-factly that the MeasureUp test engine and questions that come on the media with this book don't even come close to the real 270 exam's rigor and the answers at times conflict with what is described in the book. I haven't reached that stage of preparations yet to use the dry run exam, but just for the sake of completeness would grab Transcender's sims.
I plan to study this guide first and AFTER I'm done with it use additional prep materials.
The trial version of XP Pro also comes handy when practicing installation but in a virtual environment it expires much more quickly than 120 days. This assuming you don't have the full version Win XP Pro CD.
Few years ago I sat 271 and failed narrowly and I still remember how long and tricky were the questions. I expect to find much of the same deceit tactics when I sit 270.
Good luck with 270
P.S. And you have no Linux back end servers in your large enterprise windows network?:

MrAgent

Thanks for the info.

Yes we have some *nix based servers in our enterprise. We primarily have Windows, but we also have a lot of virtualization going on as well, so we have a lot of ESX going on. We use a lot of Red Hat Enterprise and trusted Solaris.

Devilsbane

I used the softcover book as my primary resource, but I did buy this one and skim it. I think its good enough, as long as you do some labbing of things that you see and ask questions as they come up.

MrAgent

I just registered for my exam. Taking it on Nov 11 at noon. I bought the second chance exam bundle... just in case!

earweed

Good luck on your exam!