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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One For Dummies (For Dummies
Some copies of A+ Certification All-in-One For Dummies (9781119255710) were printed without access codes to the online test bank. If you did not receive a PIN with your book, please visit www.dummies.com/go/getaccess to request one. All the knowledge you need to pass the new A+ examA+ is the gateway certification into many IT careers and can be essential in order to start your occupation off on the right foot in the exciting and rapidly expanding field of information technology. Luckily, the 9 minibooks in CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One For Dummies make it easier to prepare for this all-important exam so you can pass with flying colors! It quickly and easily gets you up to speed on everything from networking and computer repair to troubleshooting, security, permissions, customer service—and everything in between.The CompTIA A+ test is a rigorous exam, but the experts who wrote this book know exactly what you need to understand in order to help you reach your certification goal. Fully updated for the latest revision of the exam, this comprehensive guide covers the domains of the exam in detail, reflecting the enhanced emphasis on hardware and new Windows content, as well as the nuts and bolts, like operating system basics, recovering systems, securing systems, and more.• Find new content on Windows 8, Mac OS X, Linux, and mobile devices• Get test-taking advice for the big day• Prepare for the A+ exam with a review of the types of questions you'll see on the actual test• Use the online test bank to gauge your knowledge—and find out where you need more study helpWith the help of this friendly, hands-on guide, you'll learn everything necessary to pass the test, and more importantly, to succeed in your job!
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Published July 15, 2016
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November 18, 2022Many users start with the simple, “It’s broken!” It is up to you to figure out how “it” is “broken,” and you do that by asking simple questions: “What issues are you having with it? What is it not doing? Does it always happen or only at certain times?”
The user should always be asked up front, in much the same way a doctor asks whether his patient’s lifestyle has changed or whether he is on any medication. Ask the user whether he made any changes to the computer by installing software, changing hardware, or changing the computer’s location. This often provides you with an early lead to the possible problem.
That “broken” computer might be malfunctioning because of a variety of smaller problems: insufficient RAM, a fragmented hard drive, malware, Trojans, and poor networking protocol configuration.
With your list of problems, decide which are the most critical and should be approached first. “Fix the business problem first.” For example, if you are working for a stock trader, she needs her stock trading program working immediately, but she might be willing to wait for a fix to the word processing program.
after being told that a printer does not print, you might verify that its cables are in place, it powers up, it has toner or ink, and it accepts commands from the computer. if the printer is passing paper but the pages come out blank, your list of potential causes can be reduced because it is not a power issue. Rather, the problem is either with the transfer of the printing material — the ink or toner — or with the interpretation of the commands from the computer.
If there are no internal resources above you, then in many cases there is a vendor or manufacturer that you may be able to contact. Many vendor support departments have seen your problem and can offer steps to resolve the issue.
• If the problem was related to malware being installed from a website, then anti-malware software could be installed.
• If the problem was a dropped laptop, then a proper carrying case can be provided.
• If the problem was a file that was modified or deleted, then you can adjust the security or permissions on the file to prevent it from happening again.
George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Having a technician close his trouble tickets with “Problem resolved” might be fast for the technician, but it is not the purpose of the application. One of the application’s goals is to build a database of problems and resolutions. The more detail that is included in the resolution documentation, the more helpful it will be in the future.
In many cases, you will find out a product’s gotchas — those common but hard- to-solve problems that are unique to the product.
What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate. — COOL HAND LUKE
“Not listening” can extend to email. I have written emails to vendor support addresses, detailing a problem and the steps already taken to solve that problem, only to receive a stock reply from the vendor support person saying, “Try this,” which was already tried
To a client, a shoddy appearance indicates shoddy work.
The best words of advice I have for you, were given to me early in my online life: “Never put anything into an email (or social media post, tweet, blog, vlog, or whatever) that you would not want to appear on the front page of a newspaper.”
Be sure that you don’t use a magnetic screwdriver on the computer because you could erase your data!
in order for you to feel an electrostatic shock, you must have a charge of approximately 3,000 volts (V), but only about 200V are needed to kill a computer chip — and just 30V can do long- term damage to a chip.
The danger in servicing the power supply and a cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor is that both devices use capacitors that hold an electrical charge even after the component is unplugged. Creating the images on a CRT monitor takes a lot of power — typically 50,000V, which is enough to cause yourself serious harm, if not kill yourself.
Ensure that you monitor the temperature and humidity levels in areas that have computer equipment. You want to have relative humidity levels of at least 30% and a temperature around 70°F or 21°C.
a bus is a mechanism that is used to move data between devices of the computer, much like how a city bus is used to move people between bus stops in the city. Examples: USB, IEEE 1394 (or FireWire), ThunderBolt, and ExpressCard.
Many people might not think of RAM as a storage medium because it is volatile and loses its information when power is removed, but temporary storage is still storage.
A cold boot is when you shut off the power and then power it back on by using the Power button.
Cache memory is much faster memory than normal RAM
With a USB hub, you can easily increase the number of USB ports your system has
SATA is a hot-swappable technology that allows you to remove and add drives while the system is still running.
In the past, external drives were enclosures that held SATA drives, but the interface to connect the enclosure to the computer used USB or FireWire. This created overhead because the SATA interface is translated to USB or FireWire, which is slower than SATA. With eSATA connections on the motherboard, you can connect to the external drive using eSATA to leverage SATA speeds with no translation drawbacks!
Remember that the CPU performs logic operations, the NPU performs mathematical calculations, and the GPU takes care of video operations.
the overall performance of the system is controlled by more than just the speed of the processor — you need to consider other components, such as the speed of the motherboard.
Processors are made up of thousands, even millions, of transistors. A transistor acts as a switch, permitting or prohibiting the flow of electrical current. If current is allowed to flow through the transistor, some result is generated. If the current is not allowed to flow through the transistor, a different result is generated.
CMOS is the inventory list.
BIOS is the actual code that is run to communicate with those devices.
The POST is a selfdiagnostics routine that the system goes through each time it boots up.
As a way to prevent accidental writing to the BIOS code, some motherboards ship with a jumper on the board that must be removed to write to the BIOS chip.
Daisy-chaining is the feature of connecting one device off another, such as connecting the printer to the scanner and the scanner to the LPT (line print terminal) port.
system security can be bypassed if a hacker can boot off his own CD containing his own copy of an OS.
Writing to a CD is often called burning a CD.
CDRW displays three values to indicate the speed of the device: write speed, rewrite speed, and read speed — for example, 4 x 4 x 24.
Loud clicking noise: This is a bad sign that typically signifies a hard drive’s end of life. It’s crucial that you back up the data from a clicking hard drive and replace it as soon as possible.
Small electronics, such as your cellphone, do not require the amount power supplied by AC (120V or 240V) and are often designed to run on low voltage direct current (DC).
The ATX power supply specification has a minimum voltage hold-up time of 17 milliseconds (ms), or about one-sixtieth of a second. This is how long the power supply can sustain computer operation during a power interruption.
Line conditioners: Take that a step further by cleaning the noise on the line and dealing with some under- and over-voltage situations, as well as generating alarms to notify you of any situations.
Baud rate refers to the number of state changes (tones) made on the wire in any given second. If you have heard a fax machine or modem making a connection, you have heard the state changes as a series of squeals.
Each key on the keyboard has a keyswitch that closes an electrical circuit on a grid when a key is pressed. When the key contacts the grid, the keyboard controller detects the keystroke and generates a keycode. The keycode is then converted into an ASCII code that is used to display the character onscreen.
HDMI or DVI ports are much more common than VGA, although VGA continues to exist like a dinosaur that evaded extinction.
16:10 is close to the “golden ratio.” The golden ratio, which denotes an aspect ratio of 1.618, has been used throughout human history for important works of architecture, painting, book design, and so on.
A monitor's dot pitch is simply the distance (in millimeters; mm) between two pixels of the same color on a monitor.
The laser printer — also known as a page printer because it prints one page at a time — is the most popular type of printer because it is fast and reliable, and offers the best-quality printout of the three types of printers
print cartridges/print heads fall out of alignment on a regular basis. Therefore, you should make a habit of recalibrating the print output for any inkjet printers that you maintain.
When the printer receives the command from the computer to print an image, the printer starts the print process by applying an electrical charge to the heating elements that are in the ink reservoir. The charge heats the heating elements, which cause the ink to vaporize. The vaporized ink creates pressure and is forced out the pinhole, creating a tiny bubble that hits the paper.
The six phases to the laser printing process are charging (conditioning), writing, developing, transferring, fusing, and cleaning.
As a general rule, if you will use the image only for onscreen viewing, go with JPEG. If you hope to eventually print the image on paper, save it as a TIFF. The TIFF file will be larger, but it will include more detail than a JPEG file.
infrared requires line of sight. it can deliver information at up to 4 Mbps.
Bluetooth has a maximum distance of approximately 30 feet. sends data at approximately 4 Mbps.
As you move forward with the disassembly, ensure that you document and diagram the components that you remove; this includes the locations of screws and so on.
Android operating system is open-source, programmers can download the appropriate Android software development kits (SDKs) and build their own Android application packages (APKs)
BlackBerry OS: Like Apple, this OS is a proprietary product but is owned by Research In Motion (RIM).
airplane mode is useful in air travel because passengers are required to disable their radios so as not to interfere with aircraft over-the-air communications.
Most equipment has an expected lifespan measured in hours or days. This rating is the Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF).
Running chkdsk.exe scans of your hard drive for errors. SpeedFan ( www.almico.com/speedfan.php), or remotely with SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol — the TCP/IP device management and monitor protocol) tools like MRTG ( www.mrtg.com) and Cacti ( www.cacti.net). defrag.exe
When it comes to smell, you may notice smoke or a burning smell coming from the electronics when running. That problem is likely related to the locations that generate heat or friction; focus on those first.
There’s nothing quite as annoying as going to a user’s desk to look at a “broken” monitor only to find that the user has reduced the contrast and brightness to zero, leaving the image faint or nonexistent.
trade-off of features versus speed.
the command line. This application can execute any command found on the system, but is most often used for commands without a Windows GUI component.
You can use compact.exe to compress or decompress files from the command line. It supports switches that allow it to process subdirectories as well. If you suspect inconsistent compression states for your files, you can use the /F (force switch), which goes through the process of compressing all files, even if they already have the Compress attribute. This does not double-compress files, but rather ensures that all files that are supposed to be compressed actually are compressed.
With the popularity of solid state drives (SSD) you do not need to worry about defrag.
Other factors that affect the performance of the application include how the logic in the code was optimized to allow these 32-bit blocks to provide better performance.
Computers have four critical resources that can be the source of a bottleneck:
- Processor
- Memory
- Disk
- Network
Even though each icon represents a small amount of resource, they all make up the straws on the camel’s back, and you never know where the breaking point is.
LILO and GRUB are the two main boot loader packages used in Linux.
Although the printer spooler service seems to be better behaved these days, other services on your computer may not be as well behaved.
The major advantage of P2P networking is that you save money by not needing to purchase a central server
The cost of the NOS, and the licenses to have clients connect to the server, is where a number of large companies spend most of their IT budget.
twisted pair cabling has a maximum length of 100 meters
Fiber optic cabling can reach distances of 2 kilometers (km) or more. because fiber carries data in pulses of light instead of electronic signals, data cannot be corrupted by outside electronic interference.
I discuss common security options for wireless networks, most security methods are easily bypassed by a determined hacker. WEP and WPA are fairly easy encryption methods to crack and MAC filtering is fairly easy to bypass.
No security is unbreakable, and creating a better mousetrap just seems to create smarter mice.
Windows servers usually run at least two services by default:
- File sharing services: Allow the server to share files with other users on the network.
- Printer sharing services: Allow a printer to be used by multiple users on the network.
Class C address could have 256 possible addresses, numbered 0 through 255. However, you are not allowed to use 0 because it is reserved for the network ID. Also, you are not allowed to use the 255 because it is the broadcast address, which is how systems send data to every computer on the network. Any address starting with 127 is illegal because this address is reserved for the loopback address.
When troubleshooting TCP/IP communication problems, it is important to understand the steps to find exactly where the problem occurs. Is the problem in the computer you are using, in the computer you are trying to connect to, or in the default gateway?
- SMTP is the Internet protocol used to send email.
- POP3 and IMAP are the Internet protocols used to receive email.
The web really took off in 1993 when Marc Andreessen of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released NCSA Mosaic
To protect against denial of service attacks you should have a firewall installed and also keep your system patched.
you also want to ensure that you are implementing some form of a RAID solution. (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks)
Antivirus software would protect you against viruses, while antimalware software protects you against many different forms of malicious software such as viruses, spam, spyware, and adware. An example of anti-malware is Windows Defender.
To prevent a worm from infecting your system, be sure to have a firewall and make sure that you are up to date with patches.
The user should always be asked up front, in much the same way a doctor asks whether his patient’s lifestyle has changed or whether he is on any medication. Ask the user whether he made any changes to the computer by installing software, changing hardware, or changing the computer’s location. This often provides you with an early lead to the possible problem.
That “broken” computer might be malfunctioning because of a variety of smaller problems: insufficient RAM, a fragmented hard drive, malware, Trojans, and poor networking protocol configuration.
With your list of problems, decide which are the most critical and should be approached first. “Fix the business problem first.” For example, if you are working for a stock trader, she needs her stock trading program working immediately, but she might be willing to wait for a fix to the word processing program.
after being told that a printer does not print, you might verify that its cables are in place, it powers up, it has toner or ink, and it accepts commands from the computer. if the printer is passing paper but the pages come out blank, your list of potential causes can be reduced because it is not a power issue. Rather, the problem is either with the transfer of the printing material — the ink or toner — or with the interpretation of the commands from the computer.
If there are no internal resources above you, then in many cases there is a vendor or manufacturer that you may be able to contact. Many vendor support departments have seen your problem and can offer steps to resolve the issue.
• If the problem was related to malware being installed from a website, then anti-malware software could be installed.
• If the problem was a dropped laptop, then a proper carrying case can be provided.
• If the problem was a file that was modified or deleted, then you can adjust the security or permissions on the file to prevent it from happening again.
George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Having a technician close his trouble tickets with “Problem resolved” might be fast for the technician, but it is not the purpose of the application. One of the application’s goals is to build a database of problems and resolutions. The more detail that is included in the resolution documentation, the more helpful it will be in the future.
In many cases, you will find out a product’s gotchas — those common but hard- to-solve problems that are unique to the product.
What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate. — COOL HAND LUKE
“Not listening” can extend to email. I have written emails to vendor support addresses, detailing a problem and the steps already taken to solve that problem, only to receive a stock reply from the vendor support person saying, “Try this,” which was already tried
To a client, a shoddy appearance indicates shoddy work.
The best words of advice I have for you, were given to me early in my online life: “Never put anything into an email (or social media post, tweet, blog, vlog, or whatever) that you would not want to appear on the front page of a newspaper.”
Be sure that you don’t use a magnetic screwdriver on the computer because you could erase your data!
in order for you to feel an electrostatic shock, you must have a charge of approximately 3,000 volts (V), but only about 200V are needed to kill a computer chip — and just 30V can do long- term damage to a chip.
The danger in servicing the power supply and a cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor is that both devices use capacitors that hold an electrical charge even after the component is unplugged. Creating the images on a CRT monitor takes a lot of power — typically 50,000V, which is enough to cause yourself serious harm, if not kill yourself.
Ensure that you monitor the temperature and humidity levels in areas that have computer equipment. You want to have relative humidity levels of at least 30% and a temperature around 70°F or 21°C.
a bus is a mechanism that is used to move data between devices of the computer, much like how a city bus is used to move people between bus stops in the city. Examples: USB, IEEE 1394 (or FireWire), ThunderBolt, and ExpressCard.
Many people might not think of RAM as a storage medium because it is volatile and loses its information when power is removed, but temporary storage is still storage.
A cold boot is when you shut off the power and then power it back on by using the Power button.
Cache memory is much faster memory than normal RAM
With a USB hub, you can easily increase the number of USB ports your system has
SATA is a hot-swappable technology that allows you to remove and add drives while the system is still running.
In the past, external drives were enclosures that held SATA drives, but the interface to connect the enclosure to the computer used USB or FireWire. This created overhead because the SATA interface is translated to USB or FireWire, which is slower than SATA. With eSATA connections on the motherboard, you can connect to the external drive using eSATA to leverage SATA speeds with no translation drawbacks!
Remember that the CPU performs logic operations, the NPU performs mathematical calculations, and the GPU takes care of video operations.
the overall performance of the system is controlled by more than just the speed of the processor — you need to consider other components, such as the speed of the motherboard.
Processors are made up of thousands, even millions, of transistors. A transistor acts as a switch, permitting or prohibiting the flow of electrical current. If current is allowed to flow through the transistor, some result is generated. If the current is not allowed to flow through the transistor, a different result is generated.
CMOS is the inventory list.
BIOS is the actual code that is run to communicate with those devices.
The POST is a selfdiagnostics routine that the system goes through each time it boots up.
As a way to prevent accidental writing to the BIOS code, some motherboards ship with a jumper on the board that must be removed to write to the BIOS chip.
Daisy-chaining is the feature of connecting one device off another, such as connecting the printer to the scanner and the scanner to the LPT (line print terminal) port.
system security can be bypassed if a hacker can boot off his own CD containing his own copy of an OS.
Writing to a CD is often called burning a CD.
CDRW displays three values to indicate the speed of the device: write speed, rewrite speed, and read speed — for example, 4 x 4 x 24.
Loud clicking noise: This is a bad sign that typically signifies a hard drive’s end of life. It’s crucial that you back up the data from a clicking hard drive and replace it as soon as possible.
Small electronics, such as your cellphone, do not require the amount power supplied by AC (120V or 240V) and are often designed to run on low voltage direct current (DC).
The ATX power supply specification has a minimum voltage hold-up time of 17 milliseconds (ms), or about one-sixtieth of a second. This is how long the power supply can sustain computer operation during a power interruption.
Line conditioners: Take that a step further by cleaning the noise on the line and dealing with some under- and over-voltage situations, as well as generating alarms to notify you of any situations.
Baud rate refers to the number of state changes (tones) made on the wire in any given second. If you have heard a fax machine or modem making a connection, you have heard the state changes as a series of squeals.
Each key on the keyboard has a keyswitch that closes an electrical circuit on a grid when a key is pressed. When the key contacts the grid, the keyboard controller detects the keystroke and generates a keycode. The keycode is then converted into an ASCII code that is used to display the character onscreen.
HDMI or DVI ports are much more common than VGA, although VGA continues to exist like a dinosaur that evaded extinction.
16:10 is close to the “golden ratio.” The golden ratio, which denotes an aspect ratio of 1.618, has been used throughout human history for important works of architecture, painting, book design, and so on.
A monitor's dot pitch is simply the distance (in millimeters; mm) between two pixels of the same color on a monitor.
The laser printer — also known as a page printer because it prints one page at a time — is the most popular type of printer because it is fast and reliable, and offers the best-quality printout of the three types of printers
print cartridges/print heads fall out of alignment on a regular basis. Therefore, you should make a habit of recalibrating the print output for any inkjet printers that you maintain.
When the printer receives the command from the computer to print an image, the printer starts the print process by applying an electrical charge to the heating elements that are in the ink reservoir. The charge heats the heating elements, which cause the ink to vaporize. The vaporized ink creates pressure and is forced out the pinhole, creating a tiny bubble that hits the paper.
The six phases to the laser printing process are charging (conditioning), writing, developing, transferring, fusing, and cleaning.
As a general rule, if you will use the image only for onscreen viewing, go with JPEG. If you hope to eventually print the image on paper, save it as a TIFF. The TIFF file will be larger, but it will include more detail than a JPEG file.
infrared requires line of sight. it can deliver information at up to 4 Mbps.
Bluetooth has a maximum distance of approximately 30 feet. sends data at approximately 4 Mbps.
As you move forward with the disassembly, ensure that you document and diagram the components that you remove; this includes the locations of screws and so on.
Android operating system is open-source, programmers can download the appropriate Android software development kits (SDKs) and build their own Android application packages (APKs)
BlackBerry OS: Like Apple, this OS is a proprietary product but is owned by Research In Motion (RIM).
airplane mode is useful in air travel because passengers are required to disable their radios so as not to interfere with aircraft over-the-air communications.
Most equipment has an expected lifespan measured in hours or days. This rating is the Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF).
Running chkdsk.exe scans of your hard drive for errors. SpeedFan ( www.almico.com/speedfan.php), or remotely with SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol — the TCP/IP device management and monitor protocol) tools like MRTG ( www.mrtg.com) and Cacti ( www.cacti.net). defrag.exe
When it comes to smell, you may notice smoke or a burning smell coming from the electronics when running. That problem is likely related to the locations that generate heat or friction; focus on those first.
There’s nothing quite as annoying as going to a user’s desk to look at a “broken” monitor only to find that the user has reduced the contrast and brightness to zero, leaving the image faint or nonexistent.
trade-off of features versus speed.
the command line. This application can execute any command found on the system, but is most often used for commands without a Windows GUI component.
You can use compact.exe to compress or decompress files from the command line. It supports switches that allow it to process subdirectories as well. If you suspect inconsistent compression states for your files, you can use the /F (force switch), which goes through the process of compressing all files, even if they already have the Compress attribute. This does not double-compress files, but rather ensures that all files that are supposed to be compressed actually are compressed.
With the popularity of solid state drives (SSD) you do not need to worry about defrag.
Other factors that affect the performance of the application include how the logic in the code was optimized to allow these 32-bit blocks to provide better performance.
Computers have four critical resources that can be the source of a bottleneck:
- Processor
- Memory
- Disk
- Network
Even though each icon represents a small amount of resource, they all make up the straws on the camel’s back, and you never know where the breaking point is.
LILO and GRUB are the two main boot loader packages used in Linux.
Although the printer spooler service seems to be better behaved these days, other services on your computer may not be as well behaved.
The major advantage of P2P networking is that you save money by not needing to purchase a central server
The cost of the NOS, and the licenses to have clients connect to the server, is where a number of large companies spend most of their IT budget.
twisted pair cabling has a maximum length of 100 meters
Fiber optic cabling can reach distances of 2 kilometers (km) or more. because fiber carries data in pulses of light instead of electronic signals, data cannot be corrupted by outside electronic interference.
I discuss common security options for wireless networks, most security methods are easily bypassed by a determined hacker. WEP and WPA are fairly easy encryption methods to crack and MAC filtering is fairly easy to bypass.
No security is unbreakable, and creating a better mousetrap just seems to create smarter mice.
Windows servers usually run at least two services by default:
- File sharing services: Allow the server to share files with other users on the network.
- Printer sharing services: Allow a printer to be used by multiple users on the network.
Class C address could have 256 possible addresses, numbered 0 through 255. However, you are not allowed to use 0 because it is reserved for the network ID. Also, you are not allowed to use the 255 because it is the broadcast address, which is how systems send data to every computer on the network. Any address starting with 127 is illegal because this address is reserved for the loopback address.
When troubleshooting TCP/IP communication problems, it is important to understand the steps to find exactly where the problem occurs. Is the problem in the computer you are using, in the computer you are trying to connect to, or in the default gateway?
- SMTP is the Internet protocol used to send email.
- POP3 and IMAP are the Internet protocols used to receive email.
The web really took off in 1993 when Marc Andreessen of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released NCSA Mosaic
To protect against denial of service attacks you should have a firewall installed and also keep your system patched.
you also want to ensure that you are implementing some form of a RAID solution. (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks)
Antivirus software would protect you against viruses, while antimalware software protects you against many different forms of malicious software such as viruses, spam, spyware, and adware. An example of anti-malware is Windows Defender.
To prevent a worm from infecting your system, be sure to have a firewall and make sure that you are up to date with patches.
April 26, 2021
this has been one of the best tech books I ever happened to read. I did not have to undertake any comptia plus exam but I wanted to refresh myself on computer knowledge, and this is was so thorough, well explained and well edited that it went above all expectations.
April 7, 2023
This book was thoroughly informative, easy to read and educational.
Read
March 16, 2017Very Informative and helpful , all the concepta are explained properly.
December 3, 2021
There are so many spelling and grammar mistakes, that I'm inclined to believe that it hasn't been proofread at all.
Some of the material stated to be "on the exam", isn't part of the exam at all. Maybe for older exams, but not the current one. As if they just piled on newer exam objectives without deleting older ones.
Additionally, the rhythm of teaching in this book is all over the place. Some parts are dished out matter-of-factly. Other times terminology isn't defined until after having used it multiple times. Worse yet is that some of the descriptions are more confusing than elucidating, for example, the section about BIOS and CMOS, where they are used interchangeably and synonymously, yet are then described to be distinct.
When I consulted other resources to help me understand, it was clear as day what the distinctions were, yet I rubbed my head for 15 minutes over this book's description to no avail.
There is also a host of superfluous fluff/filler, like tables of standard monitor resolutions. Yet no effort is made to clearly distinguish what is important to remember and what isn't. Additionally, a lot of the chapters are just repetitions of earlier introductory chapters with a bit more detail added.
I would NOT recommend this book to anyone looking to stay motivated to study for the CompTIA A+ exams. Look up Messer, Meyers, and Dion instead.
Some of the material stated to be "on the exam", isn't part of the exam at all. Maybe for older exams, but not the current one. As if they just piled on newer exam objectives without deleting older ones.
Additionally, the rhythm of teaching in this book is all over the place. Some parts are dished out matter-of-factly. Other times terminology isn't defined until after having used it multiple times. Worse yet is that some of the descriptions are more confusing than elucidating, for example, the section about BIOS and CMOS, where they are used interchangeably and synonymously, yet are then described to be distinct.
When I consulted other resources to help me understand, it was clear as day what the distinctions were, yet I rubbed my head for 15 minutes over this book's description to no avail.
There is also a host of superfluous fluff/filler, like tables of standard monitor resolutions. Yet no effort is made to clearly distinguish what is important to remember and what isn't. Additionally, a lot of the chapters are just repetitions of earlier introductory chapters with a bit more detail added.
I would NOT recommend this book to anyone looking to stay motivated to study for the CompTIA A+ exams. Look up Messer, Meyers, and Dion instead.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews