Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Enough to Pass the Test, but needs some editing
Comment: I'm not quite sure just how to rate this book. When it's the only book of its kind on the market it has to be easily the best book on the subject. And people report that by using this book they have successfully passed the 70-536 exam. That's what the book is all about, so it meets its basic goals.
On the down size, there are a lot of typos. I found, like some other reviewers, that when I saw a typo I could see what it was supposed to be. And having to think about what the typo really meant forced me to concentrate more on that sentence. How's that for looking on the bright side.
Realistically, let's hope that a second edition comes out fairly soon that basically contains the same information but is better edited.
Conclusion: here is everything you need to know in one book. With it you get a discount on the cost of the test. With the CD you get a fully functional Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition that is good for 90 days. That's long enough to prepare for the exam.
Customer Rating:
Summary: It's OK But...
Comment: I give the book three stars because I just passed the test and couldn't have done it without this book. However, I agree with most of criticisms that have been posted. Particularly galling to me were the very poor index and the mistakes in the examples and questions
Customer Rating:
Summary: No where close to perfect, but helpful
Comment: Using this book, some extra material to handle weakness in the book, and Transcender I passed the exam. Without the book, preparation for the exam would have been much more difficult. I also found that the book provided an excellent source for information about the Framework, useful even without considering the exam.
There are numerous errors as others have specified. There are also some extremely weak sections that are of minimal help when taking the exam. This includes threading and interoperation chapters. Look for additional help on these subjects. I also thought that the instrumentation needed work.
Another issue is the presentation of information on capabilities. The book includes tables containing the more important methods, but the signatures for these methods are not included; it would have been extremely informative since this information indicates best how a method is used. Also there is no way to tell static methods from instance methods. Another weakness is that the signature of the constructors is missing.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The book is ok, nothing great; But testing software is HORRIBLE.
Comment: I have almost finished reading the book for the first time. I am going to reread it again and throughly work through the examples.
Here is my opinion about the book. It is pretty good. It covers a lot of topics and has more than 1000 pages. Because of the sheer breadth of the covered material some topics are not described in the detail they deserve. Despite of that, it is a great study guide. My rating - 85%.
Now, the testing software that comes with this book is unbelievingly lame. I cannot stress enough how lame and unusable that stupid software is. It is designed for screens with resolution 800 * 600. It looks like it was written in VB6, thus it does not scale well on high resolution monitors. I just cannot believe that this software was actually released. What a shame... I hope that other books in the series will have better software.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Embarrassing
Comment: It seems this book was written by a team of beginners and I'm not talking about the numerous typos, but something like "class" instead of "object", "include" instead of "using" (many, many times) etc. It deserved 2 stars only for the exam voucher and for being usable after a look at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923018/en-us for a long list of errata.
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