IT Essentials: PC Hardware and Software Labs and Study Guide

Excellent packaging, wonderful service. I bought this book to supplement my reading and I am 100% satisfied.

The book is meant as a supplement or aid to IT Essentials: PC Hardware and Software Companion Guide (3rd Edition). I haven't looked at the latter, so I'm going to review this book based on that absence. The book itself ultimately supplements the actual hands on labs offered for the Cisco Networking Academy, that cover the CompTIA A+ exam topics. This needs to be emphasised. If you aspire to be a credentialled technician, you really should already have actual lab experience. No doubt Cisco will say through their lab courses. Maybe there are independent labs that also train you for the exam. So when an earlier reviewer remarked that the book disconnects from the other book, that may be true but misses the point. Just reading from books is not enough, even in principle, for an experimental credential. Also, the reviewer said "how do you find the answers". She then said she used other A+ books and websites to do so. Inadvertently perhaps, while she meant that as a negative critique of this book, it forced her to do more than just trivially look up the answer in another book. The best way to answer the problems in this book is to already have used the various control panels, changed system registry values, tweaked the BIOS etc. Plus, a lot of this book already has detailed steps for the above topics, with many screen captures of system control panels, where appropriate. While there are problems that deliberately have no single specific answer. Like page 209, where you are asked to "research a video adapter card". There are questions that then flow from this. The answers are a function of what you've picked. Keep in mind what your ultimate objective should be. Not passing the exam and getting that credential. But being able to walk into a customer site and diagnose and fix a computer problem. Readers who want simple cookbook methodology of using this book and flipping back and forth between this and the other book are shortchanging their education.