Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: MCTS 70-528 Exam Preparation Guide
Comment: This is the only book available in the market for 70-528 Exam Preparation. This book gives a good coverage of exam objectives. It also comes with 300 practice questions, MSDN links. There are some obvious errors in the practice questions as well as in the book. The other online preparation materials like Transcender and Measureup also aren't perfect either. If you do a solid preparation of going over the material, MSDN Links and supplement with practice tests like Transcender and Measureup, you can do well in the exam. I passed this exam also in my first attempt. I think it is a very good book for exam preparation.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: This book was very useful
Comment: This book help me to grade on 70-536 exam. It's some errors on code, but achieves the purposes.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good coverage of Exam objectives
Comment: I've struggled to form an opinion on this book, but reading the other reviews has made things clearer for me. I feel that the reviewer who gave it two stars was being overly harsh... although I do agree with some of his/her points.
The book is of no real use to anyone not writing the exam - it does not focus on giving you the kind of knowledge you need to write "real world" web applications, but rather on covering the exam objectives, as laid down by Microsoft. It does a pretty good job of covering those objectives though. I have not written the exam yet (and that of course is the real test of the book's worth), but I thought some of the sections were a bit superficial. This annoyed me at first, but realistically speaking the book would need to be 5000+ pages long to cover these many objectives with any sort of depth. You could write a 1000 page book on ADO.net and still have to leave information out, for example.
The book gives you a pretty good overall understanding of the concepts involved in each exam objective, and the labs are great at reinforcing those concepts. The authors have done a good job, but I would have liked more depth on some of the chapters. I believe it's necessary to supplement this book by using Google to get indepth knowledge of some of the topics... but then anyone who actually wants to master his/her subject matter would be doing this anyway. One book, no matter how good, can never deliver mastery of something as "big" as ASP.net.
There are some typos and mistakes, but not enough to be a problem if you are paying attention. My biggest gripe with the book (and the major reason for only 4 stars) is not actually with the book itself, but rather the test questions on the CD. Surely it can't be that hard for a Microsoft Press book to have questions that are actually close to the Microsoft exam questions in terms of complexity? If you are going to use the existence of the test-software as a "drawcard" for potential buyers, then make the questions as real as possible please. The last exam I wrote (many years ago) was C++ Distributed Applications, but the exam questions were a lot more complicated than the practise questions on this CD.
Customer Rating:
Summary: preparing for 70-528
Comment: Book has quite a few typos, mistakes and suffers an almost complete lack of depth.
Besides providing a test related table of contents not much value (information) added anywhere. Supplied electronic tests faulty and fitted with very few questions (quite a few of them would actaully belong to 70-536 instead).
On the one hand nicely described trivia infos like difference between active and passiv FTP connections (nice to know in that depth even if fully useless) on the other hand lack of depth on any ASP related control (lots of space wasted on trivia that could have otherwise been used to actually provide valuable information). Trivia source code supplied en masse but ASP related (specific) missing :-((.
Resumé:
Anybody could have compiled a table of contents and supplied help related superficial information and would more or less have produced similiar quality (no better no worse).
Comparison to Previous Test (70-536)
- even greater lack of depth
- electronic test questions supplied (~100 not really sufficient, 70-536 had over 300)
MHO: In no way is this book designed to get anybody through the test.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good way to pass the test
Comment: This is a good book to use for preparing for the specific exam it covers. I read it for that purpose and passed the exam on the first try. The writing is clear and the examples and practices are relevant. The typos, errors and omissions are noticeable but tolerable (somewhat expected for the first printing of this type of book). I enjoyed the writing style and especially the first few chapters that covered conceptual topics. The later chapters are a little dry--I would guess that even the author was bored by the last chapter recounting the endless minutiae of deployment and monitoring.
If you're not planning on taking this exam--get a different book. There are no tips and tricks, no in-depth coverage of how to accomplish real-world tasks, no hand-holding for novices, and a whole lot of extra chapters covering what is likely miscellany to most developers. The book is exactly what it purports to be: a training kit for the purpose of passing this particular exam.
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