Took the exams back-to-back at a horrible Prometric testing site in San Jose today (but that's for another post perhaps). The good news is that I scored 866/900 and 856/900.

I've got over 12 consecutive years of field experience, but never had any formal training or certifications before. I've also pretty much been away from the industry for about the past 5 years. I spent the past two solid weeks self-studying 5-12 hours/day to prepare. I don't profess to know what's best, but I just thought I'd share a bit of my story and what worked for me.

I went to Amazon and purchased Scott Mueller's CompTIA A+ 220-701 and 220-702 Cert Guide, which I do NOT recommend. It's written/organized much more like a reference book than a suitable "guide" for the exams. In other words, unlike the diligent Professor Messer, the author chose to forgo the order of the published objectives and instead just threw everything together almost haphazardly. There were numerous times that I wasn't even able to locate key terms in the index. Even as a reference, I think it fell short in many cases. Unless you intend to sit down and read this roughly 1000 page book from cover to cover, I'd steer clear.

Professor Messer's videos were quite helpful and I'm very grateful for the tremendous contribution of time, effort, and expertise! They were a very valuable resource in addition to lots of reading, practice exams, and wiki searches.

Regarding practice exams: Be sure to take the two practice exams that are available on the CompTIA site. There are only 30 questions on each, but it will give you a good feel for what the testing procedure is like at the testing site, as well as a general feel for the types of questions. Be sure to research/figure out the correct answers for each one of the questions.

Best of luck to the other candidates!

Archer

Good to hear, thanks for the feedback. I think that explaining why you thought that a book or study aid was helpful or not helpful, is the main reason people keep coming to this site for guidance on studying for exams.

good job on that test those were definitely some solid scores. was there any thing that was strongly focused on?

Yes, please do share what was on the test/what areas the test particularly focused more on.