MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-433): Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Database Development [With CDROM]

I took the exam 433 with help of this book from MS and BOL, Book of APress. This book covers nearly all topics of MS-exam (70-80%). It is suitable for the beginning of developments with SQL2008. For a more complete study see other sources too.

The book: Great book, covers all of the exam topics very well and in a concise manner. You'll learn everything you need to know by doing the practice lessons that are at the end of every chapter. Even if you're not writing the exam, this book would be great for someone wanting to learn about SQL 2008 changes on the developer level. Highly recommended! The practice exams that are included: Are horrible for the most part. Many of the questions are overly complex and some make no sense. For example, to have a persisted view, what SET options have to be set to on. Choose all that apply (from a list of 10 or so possible answers)...nobody with a life is going to know that or even need to know it. Also some of the answers are quite wrong, tried a few of the queries and they failed, even though they were marked as right. I honestly wouldn't even use the practice exams and instead use MeasureUp or SelfTestSoftware. In summary, the book is great, I went over the book for about a month and a half, and combined with my experience I scored 100% on the exam.

Even though I felt the shipping to be a tad on the expensive side, the delivery was quick and very well serviced. I was called to ensure that I got the product at the address that I wanted. The book itself is as described, in good condition, and the packaging was great. No complaints, every thing went smooth!

I purchased this book as soon as it was released, and used it as my exclusive study material for the exam. I took my exam today and passed by a healthy margin. Although I use SQL Server on a daily basis at my job, much of the content of the exam goes beyond my typical day-to-day development tasks, and I don't believe I would have passed the exam had I not used this material to prepare for it. The only bad thing I have to say about this book involves the Practice Tests provided on the CD. Very frequently, questions would deal with topics that simply were not covered in the book itself. Typically the questions would ask for highly specific syntax to perform fairly obscure tasks. The questions direct you to the chapter and section of the book where the topic is covered, but it was very common for me to find no reference at all to a question's topic when I referred to that section (or when I search the PDF version of the book.) The good news is that each test question, and its answers, are fully explained. But the bad news is that I felt like the practice questions were testing me on materials that simply weren't discussed in the book. This made me feel unprepared for the exam, and it made me question whether the book was incomplete, or if the practice questions were actually beyond the scope of the exam. In the end, the actual exam had none of the obscure questions I had grown used to seeing on the practice exams, and I believe that every question on the exam itself was covered adequately in the book. So if you're studying for this exam, and you feel like the practice tests are causing you to reconsider taking it, you should probably give the exam a shot. I got a 10% better score on the actual exam than I did on the best practice test I took from the CD.