Subtitles of the Movie

Well, here we are at the course wrap up and advice video, and I'd like to start this by saying I can't emphasize enough that to prepare for the A Plus exam ah you need hands-on experience. That is the best way to study for this exam. Um, and let me say something about the exam as I talk about this stuff. If you talk to ten people who've taken this exam a couple of them will tell you it's a piece of cake, a couple of them will tell you, It's the hardest test I ever took; a couple of them will tell you, Eh, it's kind of what I expected, and so forth, ah, so what I'm getting at is, your preparation and your level of experience is going to determine ah, how easy or how hard this test is. Now, if you have not had the privilege of much hands-on experience in this industry, it's really not a problem, because if you can get your hands on a machine running Windows XP you can all the hands-on you need just about. So, watch through these videos, pay close attention. Almost everything that's on these videos will be on the exam. I tried to really cherry pick the information. Um, do some outside reading. Okay. Now I want to be very honest with you here. There's a lot of information in this course and I've struggled to make sure that I put as much as I possibly can right off those objectives, but it's still possible to leave some things out or not express it in such a way that you really picked up on it, okay. So, do some outside reading. A lot of times libraries will have the ah A Plus books, ah, if they don't you can ask them to try to get one, and they'll get it and put it on the shelf. This is something that a library should have, ah, to, for a lot of those folks out there, high school folks, college folks, career changers who want to get into IT, this would be a great ah public service to have on the shelves. And there's some excellent books out there, and I'll just tell you one or two that ah, I've looked at. Ah, go to your local bookstore and look in the computer section and you'll see some. One that people consistently rank one of the very best is Mike Meyer's book, The Comp TIA A Plus Certification. This thing is ah, like a little over 1100 pages long. Use that as a resource. Ah, Mike Meyers ah is one of the ah, the gurus in the A Plus certification world and his, his books are excellent. Ah, they're wordy ah; 1100 pages. It's going to take you a while to read that and ah, maintaining and retaining all that information is going to be kind of tough, but ah his books are excellent. The Comp TIA Website is a great place, and here's the link to it. Go out there and look at ah, all the information they have about the A Plus exam. Ah, you might want to ah, definitely want to, go out and look at the objectives. These are the things they will be testing you on. And what I would do is, go through this video, ah, print those objectives out, and read through them, and, and look at every one of those things individually and think as you look at it, Does that make sense to me? Do I know what they're talking about there? Do I remember that in the video? Is it something that I missed? Is it, you know, does it not make sense? Or whatever. Okay. There is a lot of information that can be covered on this. Another great way to prepare for this, especially if you haven't had much experience with ah, these kinds of certification exams, are some of the practice exam products that are for sale out there, and you can Google this and ah, see A Plus practice exams; just make sure you're getting the ones for the 2006 ah A Plus exam, and what you want to look for in these practice exams are those that give you practice questions that fully explain the answers and show you why the wrong answers were wrong and why the correct answers were correct. Keep in mind you're going to have to spend about another 150 bucks on this. It's not necessary, but it can really help those of you who've never been through any of these certification exams before. Okay, so get some hands-on, do some outside reading, and I meant to say on the outside reading as well, you don't have to go out and spend a bunch of money for books and so forth, you can find a lot of this reading out there, ah, on the Internet, and ah, so just go out there and start to look around, do some searches, and you can find a lot of ah, basic computer stuff. Look on Microsoft's Website. Look at some of the white papers on their operating systems and so forth. Those will tend to go into more detail than you need, but ah, they, they'll help you quite a bit. So, anyway, that's my advice. Ah, thanks for purchasing the course. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got a lot out of it, and ah, I hope to ah, get the opportunity to teach you again, in a, in a future course for VTC.