For those who regularly renew their Microsoft Certification, you may notice that the 70-486 book is relatively thin (about 380 pages) and one-third the price (around $26 on online book store like Amazon), when you compare it wit other exam preparation books by Microsoft Press.
So what's the catch?
Most exam preparation books usually teach you about the technologies and how to use it. They usually provide some step-by-step training on how to accomplish certain tasks, while covering most of the topics around the exam. Most the time, the exam prep books try to teach you a certain technology from beginner level, which is great if you are new to the technology.
This is not the case for the 70-486 Book. The content of the 70-486 Book is mainly focus on the different Objectives for the exam. It provides certain high-level overview and advice on the various topics around the objectives, but little details on the low-level development and implementation. It assumes the reader already have some experience with ASP.NET MVC 4, and that the reader is studying this book mainly for the exam preparation.
Without a doubt, the 70-486 book does cover all objectives and topic. Yet outside of the scope of exam preparation this book is not very useful. It gives me a feeling that Microsoft Press simply wants to put up an exam prep book for the sake of publishing an exam prep book for every exam.
For those who are preparing for the 70-486 exam, you may want to read it.
For those who simply want to learn ASP.NET MVC 4, you better look elsewhere, such as the Professional ASP.NET MVC 4 by Wrox, which is a much better training guide and it covers so much more.
Winter is coming, and we are entering another exam studying season. Next stop, Exam 70-487: Developing Windows Azure and Web Services. This will lead me to the latest Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD): Web Applications.
Ironically, I was certified with the old MCSD: .NET around 10 years ago. Since then Microsoft changed the title to Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD). Now they are reusing the old name, which leads to tons of confusion for a lot of our clients.
P.S. As of this writing, Microsoft just release the new Visual Studio 2013 together with ASP.NET MVC 5 Framework.
Most of the newer projects in my company is still in VS2010 and .NET4, and we still have lots of .NET 2.0/3.5 projects that we need to support.
It's not just that our training cannot catch up with all these new stuffs, all these new certification are already "out-dated" by the time we start studying it.
After all, it makes me wonder whether it's really worth it to get certified.
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