Not just grade A, I’m A+ and I have the papers to prove it. Or I should in 6-8 weeks. I took and passed the exams earlier this week. In some ways I feel a little silly about it, because it’s a lightweight certification that’s meant to demonstrate only very basic computer maintenance skills. I’ve put off doing the certification dance for too long though, and going through the process with an easy exam has been a good way to get my feet wet.
I took about 30 hours over two weeks to self-study, much of it spent reading the Osborne book book, which I was fairly disappointed with. Although I did learn something useful from most of the chapters in the book, it’s badly edited. Technical terms are routinely misused, and many of the sample test questions are worded poorly enough to cause confusion even if you understand the material. If I had it to do over again, I might try the Sybex book in hopes that it was better.
Although there’s some basic conceptual knowledge required to pass the test, a good deal of it is fact recall. I made up a set of flashcards that I used to memorize the requisite bits. Download the flashcards in both granule deck format (granule is a gem, by the way… especially on the Nokia 770) and colon-delimited text format. If you use/improve them, please send me the updates and I’ll make them available here.
If you’re thinking of taking the test yourself, have a look at Comptia’s exam overview page, objectives for the core hardware exam, and the objectives for the OS exam.
Congrats! A+ is a basic cert but any cert is good on your resume, and many employers require you to have some of CompTIA certs. Good luck with other certs.
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Left by nadir on May 10th, 2006