Michael Meyers' A+ Certification Lab Manual (All-in-one) Book

If you have some book knowledge, a PC to dissect and a lack of actual experience in cracking cases open, the A+ Certification Lab Manual will do everything but remove the floppy drives for you as it cheerfully walks you through your PC's guts. Guided walk-throughs, backed up with clear explanations and a more-than-generous dollop of real-world experience, make this a perfect book for beginners and intermediates. The Lab Manual is a series of 20 walk-through sections that require some basic hardware knowledge. They focus on giving the reader a working knowledge of how the parts fit into the computer, how to put them together and the common things that go wrong in the real world. It serves as a nice yin to the yang you'll get with most A+ guides, giving you hands-on information that fleshes out your theoretical knowledge. One does wish though that someone had told Michael Meyers that a picture is worth a thousand words. It's frustrating to have a half a page's worth of writing on what an ISA slot and an ISA card look like without a single picture. The pictures that are there are poorly laid out and in some cases blurry. Another slight problem with the book is its focus. To be fair, it really goes into some depth in the early and most heavily tested sections--the indispensable hardware parts like the processor, the motherboard, the hard and floppy drives. But near the end of the book, the walk-throughs for the sections worth 5 per cent of your total A+ score become almost exasperatingly short. Finally, the fact that Lab Manual is not a reference guide might put some readers off. Commonly tested topics like the lists of hexadecimal memory addresses and the differences between the various processors aren't mentioned except in passing; if this is the only guide you buy, you are certain to fail. What this book does do however is meld the theoretical knowledge you've gained from whatever A+ reference you've used with the hands-on experience you'll need in the field. Using this in conjunction with a solid book will weld the knowledge into your head forever, reinforcing what you've already learned via endless lists and paragraphs into solid, screwdriver-twisting experience. --William SteinmetzRead More