Passed My A+ Today (601,602) :)

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Passed my 220-602 today, got 819/900 and passed my 601 last weds, got 771/900

For those interested these are the materials i used to do it:
Mike Myers "All In One" sixth edition - read the whole book once all the way through, writing notes and doing the tests at the end of each chapter and used the enclosed cd to do the practise exams quite a bit. This took me about 4 months, although i did start - stop a bit due to my son being born and a few other not quite so significant things that got in the way!
Whilst reading the book i watched the corresponding videos on CBT nuggets. These i found quite useful, but def not enough to pass the exams on their own. I was lucky in that i didnt have to pay to view these videos as my brother is the IT manager at a local school and had access to them - dont know if i'd recommend the extra expense in buying these - the Myers "All In One" book seems to be sufficient for pretty much all the course content.
After finishing the Myers book i booked the exams for a months time, to give me the incentive to revise the contents of that big fat book! I then bought 2 books from Amazon - Mike Myers Certification Passport 3RD edition (this is like a condensed version of the All In One book, and is a lot more managable in both content and size!), I spent about 2 weeks of evenings reading this book and doing the end of chapter tests and practise exams on the cd (although the questions on this cd are very similar to the one that comes with the All In One book). The next week i spent on the other book i bought "EXAM CRAM - Comptia A+ Practise Questions" by Charles j. Brooks, this book was great for practise questions and covered both the 601 and 602 exams fairly thoroughly with detailed answers to questions - a few of the questions even appeared in the real exams!
Also i should add - and i think this was also a great help - that in the month before i took the exams i subcribed to Professor Messor's daily A+ Pop Quiz (www.freeaplus.com). By doing this you get an A+ question sent to your inbox daily, and it encourages you to watch a free training video on topics you get wrong - i learnt (or revised) quite a bit thanks to Professor Messor and his free A+ stuff.

Hope some of this might be useful to any of you guys currently studying for your A+, and good luck!

On another note (and sorry if this should be a separate thread) i was hoping for some opinions - i was chatting to the invigilator after the exam and i mentioned that perhaps now i should go on and study for the Network+. He said that a lot of the students at the college were skipping the N+ and going straight onto the CCNA as a lot of the N+ stuff was covered in the CCNA exams and the Cisco cert was more of an industry recognised qualification. Is this true? I was lead to believe that the CCNA may be a bit more "advanced". I kind of got the impression he was trying to get me to sign up for the college's CCNA course where each of the 4 modules would cost me £250! A grand seems quite steep when i did my A+ for about £50 (not including the cost of the tests). Anyway just trying to pick some brains - i'd like to get a job in IT as soon as i can and obviously take the correct path of certs, without cutting corners. Thanks for any advice in advance guys.

 

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congrats mate, well done.
Booked my Essentials 601 for early July just yesterday.

Always good to hear people successfully working towards the same goals as me.
Like you, I too had a young child to contend with, aside from working 6 days a week. So like a lot of people, I know the sacrifice we make to advance ourselves and how hard it can be. But then if it was easy, why bother!

Agree with you on the Meyers All-in-One publication.
It was the people on this site who pursuaded me to throw out the frankly rubbish in comparison, "Comptia A+ for Dummies" that i wasted 4 months using, and go with Mike Meyers.

 

Thanks veloce....and good luck for july, keep studying and you'll nail it

 

Congrats!

If true, that's somewhat troubling.

I'd recommend that you avoid the CCNA until you start working with Cisco gear. And that's not something you'll be asked to do just starting out in IT. No company in their right mind would hire someone without experience to administer Cisco gear. The TP is simply trying to upsell you... or else, they simply don't know any better.

You've got the A+... start looking for an entry-level job NOW. While looking, continue to pursue solid, entry-level certifications, such as Network+ and MCDST. As you get them, add them to your CV and keep looking.

Best of luck to you.

 

I have my exams tomorrow and I'm a bit scared

 

Well done on the passes

If some of the questions in that book did appear in the real exam then author will be in big trouble. This would be the same as brandumps which are the real questions from the exams and therefore illegal.

 

There was at least one question in the 602 exam where the wording was what seemed at the time, (i may be wrong) to be exactly as i had read it before. I cant remember exactly which one now, unless i skim through the book again, but i can remember smiling to myself when it came up! There were a couple of other questions in both exams that definitely seemed very very similar to those i had revised.
Also that book i used was printed in 2008, i took my exam on weds - surely it would be the case that the question was "plagiarised" from the book rather than braindumped by the author?
It seems entirely possible to me that with the sheer volume of practise tests available, either as books or downloaded test engines that out of the thousands of questions, some may be, if not repeated, then incredibly similar to the questions in the real tests?

 

Similar is okay but the same is not. When you do these certification exams wether it be a Microsoft or compTIA one there is a large pool that your questions are taken from. No one has access to these questions apart from compTIA and MIcrosoft.

The theory is that no one gets the same exam although they may get some of the same questions. There are people out there that are paid to take the exams and memorize the questions i.e for braindumps compTIA and MS frown very heavily on this and publishing those questions will get the publisher into a lot of trouble.

When people like Boson Michael and Boson Josh create a practice exam for something they create those questions based on the objectives in that exam although possible to make the wording similar to proper exam questions it is very unlikely that they would be able to create an exam question that is exactly the same unless they were actually using the real exam questions.

So maybe it was just similar to a question you got.

 

hey guys, today I passed Essentials, can I pass 602 in another training centre? or do I have to do it in same?

 

Congratulations Mariusz, well done dude. I cant think of any reason why you have to complete the next exam at the same test centre? Surely you can find out by logging onto Pearson or Prometric and try booking it somewhere else, if thats what you want to do. Didnt you like the test centre or something?!

 

I took the two exams for the MCDST at two different exam centers and it never occurred to me that it could be an issue. Like the above poser I can't think of any reason why Comptia would be any different. The exam results will get to Comptia regardless.

I however did wait many years between taking the A+ and the Network+ and Prometric somehow messed up my Comptia ID and I ended up with two ID's for Comptia so I had to call them and get them to merge my records so I didn't have one account showing A+ and one showing Net+. That shouldn't be an issue if you use the same account to sign up for the second test!

 

Congratulations

 

@ssiruuk1
I did like the centre, but according to promeric website they cannot do exam on Tuesday, and it is the day when I want to pass it (hopefly) and forget it (and start preparing to N+)
anyway I barely passed as I had only 690 points, I have problems with keeping focused on tests like this and after 50 questions I had enough, after 80 I was really fed up, hopefully I will do better with 602