Amazon.com Review
A solid set that will help you get through the exam, the MCSA Self-Paced Core Requirements Training Kit is a valuable tool in the arsenal of any potential MCSA student. Not only will you get over a thousand collective pages of excellent MCSA-style questions to dissect, but most of the books are solid tutorials in their own right.

Of the four books that come with it, two are out-of-the-park smash hits, one is a decent guide... and one is an abject, shambling failure. So let's start with the good: Managing a Microsoft Windows 2000 Network Environment is an excellent introduction to how an active Win2K LAN should work. Now, admittedly, much of this book will be redundant to those who already know networking and Windows NT basics--if you already know how to share a file, or how to use TCP/IP properly, there won't be a lot here for you. This is just the absolute minimum you need to know in order to set up and maintain a Win2K environment. But then again, this book isn't written for the advanced user; it's aimed squarely at the beginning user, the person who needs some refreshing on what DNS does or why NetBIOS can't be routed. In addition, this is the only book that really focuses in on elementary troubleshooting, asking the user to "break" certain parts of a network and see what the repercussions are. As such, this is a solid introduction to the basics that the rest of the books are founded upon.

The MCSE Windows 2000 Server book is one of the finest self-paced training kits that Microsoft has ever produced. It goes into a lot of detail on the trickier bits of Windows 2000--things like the boot process, remote installation, and RADIUS--and getting through these sections will be arduous, but ultimately rewarding. In fact, the only real problem with the book can be said to lie in its very technical nature; more than any other book in this package, the Win2K Server book tends to bury you in insignificant details that you probably won't ever be tested on. That said, if you study this guide diligently, you will pass. One of the strengths of this set is how well the books fit into each other, and the Windows 2000 Server book includes enough knowledge to almost guarantee a pass.

The Windows 2000 Professional book is both a lot weaker and, in some senses, stronger. It doesn't go into nearly as many details as Windows 2000 Server does--it barely mentions must-know topics like the HCL and how to create boot floppies. As a standalone book, this would have serious flaws... but taken as part of a whole, it actually forms a nice complement to the Server book. Read in order, the Windows 2000 Professional book goes over the elementary concepts and Windows 2000 Server delves into the details; any topic mentioned in both books is pretty much guaranteed to be on the exam, and reading both gives you a solid shot at passing both exams at once.

The weak link in this set, sadly, is the Network Infrastructure Administration book. Considering that it deals with some of the most complex concepts to be found anywhere in the exam series, it's disappointing that this is the thinnest book in the lot. And the sparseness shows, as this book leaps like a gazelle from topic to topic, lighting briefly upon, say, IPX for a brief moment, then darting off to give you not nearly enough information on routing, then dancing over to IPSec and assuming you understand the basics of cryptography. Admittedly, it has a nice section on DNS and DHCP--but so does Managing a Windows 2000 Network Environment. This book would have been a lot better with an additional 400 pages or so to fully flesh out the skeleton that it so tantalizingly provides.

A common problem, however, is that none of the books are study guides per se. They're excellent tutorials and they do cover the objectives in the exams, but all of the books share the common flaw of treating every fact as if it were equally important. That's nice when it comes to learning software, but let's be honest: you don't want to know the software, you want to pass the test. And every MCSA test has notorious tricky spots--the ones that novices generally tend to screw up, or the bits that are easy to confuse. If you were to use these books as your only references, you might well miss something that a more test-oriented book would flag as a "must-know" topic. But by giving equal weight to every fact, it does take a lot longer to study, even if you ultimately achieve Microsoft's intended goal of knowing how to use the program.

About a third of every book, however, is devoted to tough MCSA-style questions--which means that you'll be able to take a lot of sample tests in this package. Unlike many study guides, the questions included are fairly hard-hitting; they're not quite up to the difficulty of the exam proper, but they're darn close. Furthermore, each set of questions is broken down by objective, and each answer is gone over in full detail. Did you choose A by mistake? All of the books will not only tell you why D is right in a dense paragraph or two, but it explains why A wasn't even close to being right. That alone makes these fairly valuable study guides.

To sum up, this is a pretty excellent boxed set in its own right. The thousand pages' worth of tough MCSA-style questions might be worth the money, and the 120-day trial edition of Windows 2000 Server would definitely push the value close to the edge... but combine those two with the solid tutorials and information that this series provides, and you've got a definite winner that's worth every penny. They may not be the only books that you'll want to buy, but with the exception of the infrastructure exam, you'll purchase any other books in order to focus on what's important. Pretty much everything you're looking for on Windows 2000 is in here. Highly recommended. --William Steinmetz