This year I switched from employer and the new employer demands that I take the 70-296 exam to finish my mcse2003. This made me think, what is the best way to aprouch a exam, how to study for a exam. Are courses nessecary? or are they just a good add-on to get to know what it's all about.

In 2006 I followed the CCA4.0 administring course and I worked already 2 years with Metaframe Presentation Server 3.0 and migrated some servers to the new Metaframe Presentation Server 4.0 environment. For me it was a eye opener why I did some things, and what I could have done better.

We all know the paper guys and girls. Those who study only questions and answers they find within testkings and learn braindumps from there head and then get the exam done succesfully. In my opinion these are the folks we can miss like toothpain.

From my view, I setup a testenvironment IF possible and then simply go with the flow, see what the software does, what kind of configurations are possible and were is what to find. Now offcourse you cannot find everything by yourself and there are books written by those who help us study. Microsoft Press books which are available in every bookshop are a good helping hand if you want to do Microsoft exams, for Citrix you have offcourse the books of Brain Madden, Douglas Brown and lot's more who write about Server Based Computing.

Now that covers the books :) don't you think, there are also programs that help you make examns. I always read the Testkings (ripped not bought offcourse) and those helped me a lot finding my weakspots what I had to study on. A few years ago I stumbled on trandumper with interactive examns. The program loads a txt file made available by others who remember the questions with all the answers. This was a good way of getting to know very fast what they flaws in my learning pattern were. Last year I got a new Testking version, it's interactive and you have to unlock it first online.  Now since I find Testking expensive I searched for another program that is cheap and found Visual CertExams a relative cheap program costing 25$ and it does a good job. When you buy both the designer and manager you can make your own examns for others to take.

You have tons of material on the internet to find to prepare for examns and what the best way is, well I think that is for each individual to decide, some learn books from head others learn testkings by head and like myself there are those who use the programs available to see what they still have to learn.

I am currious to find out what your aprouch is, you can write it by adding a comment to this article.