I just passed my test in the high 800's using this book- I'd venture to say it is important to do the labs and use any on-line references you can to help you; I use CompTIA's IT Pro 24x7 book library myself for additional studies. Overall MS press does a good job, it is expected I think to do the labs and practice tests is you want to succeed. A good background in Vista would be most beneficial as well to gather a thorough understanding of hwo it works and why.

This self-help book helped me a lot in preparing me for the MCITP exams. Having a busy time at work and no time at all to go to a learning partner, the book guided me through the learning objectives of the exam.

This review is for the 70-622! I have never reviewed any book before because I generally agree with the high ratings and therefore see no reason to write one. Beware of the other "high" reviews of this book they are for the 70-443 or 70-441 where stated which are specific to becoming an MCITP on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 not an MCITP on Windows Vista the 70-431, 70-441, 70-441 have nothing to do with this book or certification! I do not know why those reviews are here but don't listen to them for the 70-622 Book.

I am only halfway through this book and all I can say is it is riddled with a lot of typos, unclear explanations, and technical errors and leaves a lot to be desired in terms of detailed explanations in some subject areas. Also details have been left out on potential sticking points (such as making exceptions in the new Vista firewall and UAC control issues).

For example one pitfall I discovered early on there is no explanation in the difference of going to start Run or start and the search box in Vista (these are two different things the run box is not on the start menu by default).

Typos:
pg. 246 is just one example of many typos. It says under the section Histogram Bar: "If you have a large number of values and you're primarily interested in the current value (rather than the value of each counter over time), this will be EARLIER to read then the line chart"
I think it should have said EASIER, but being that we are talking about a histogram which has to do with a timeframe it could also mean it shows an earlier point then the line chart. However if that were the case that would be some extremely poor sentence structure. I do believe it should have said EASIER.

Technical Issues:
When joining the Vista PC to a Windows 2003 Server Domain you get a DNS related error message. What the author fails to mention is that you may have to go into the advanced properties of the NIC card and either under TCP/IP v4 or v6 enter the IP address of the 2003 Server as your preferred DNS server before the Vista PC's can join the domain.

On pg. 238 - 239 Practice 3 Configuring and Event Subscription
The terms Event collecting and Event forwarding are counter intuitive. Instead of laying out bulleted parameters such as the author saying Vista PC1 is the collecting computer and Vista PC2 is the forwarding computer would be helpful. Really to grasp this counter intuitive convention of naming they have used here a diagram would have been best showing the events and how they are collected and forwarded.

You would think the collecting computer would be the one the events are being generated on. That is not the case it is the one getting the events from the forwarding computer which is forwarding the events to it.

During this exercise I got an error saying "Object reference not set to an instance of an object". After changing two things (making an exception in the windows firewall and putting in a description in the description field), I can now successfully complete the exercise. Before doing these two things the subscription would not work. I had tried over 10 times and kept getting that same error however I now cannot replicate the error by reversing my two steps so I cannot explain this.

Overall the book to me seems very rushed and poorly edited. I am hoping I can pass the 70-621 upgrade exam with this book and the 70-620 but I think I will most likely have to supplement this with another in depth book on Vista as this book is very lacking in my opinion.

The hardware requirements are extensive, a machine running Vista Business or above, a Server 2003 machine and a blank machine to install Vista on using the WAIK. However the instructions to create the WAIK so far have failed to work. So I am still in the setup phase.

This book prepares you verry well for the exam. Its not a big book but its very concice and lets you practice most of the topics you read. The requirements to study for this book are to have a few virtual machines to setup up a local network with a server which has some server roles and few clients. Thats cool because in that way you practice like in the enterprise enviroment. The exercises are very well explained with just a few typos so far. I recomend to create vista virtual machines without sp1 cuz it uninstall the gpmc.msc console that you need to make some exercises. Overall its a very nice book to study, grab it.