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| A+ Books |
| To me sometimes it seems like there are more A+ certification books than are telephone books for each city in the world. Of course each one claiming they're the best. So of course you were wondering why would I waste my time creating an A+ book when there were so many others choose from. |
History |
| Years ago I was the CTO & lead instructor for a Washington state vocational-technical school known as TcatU.net. At the time we were using the Sybex book. CompTIA was updating the tests to the 2001 objectives. I remember the day very well that I took the two new beta tests, it was November 14th. To me it was like a personal Pearl Harbor. The core test seemed pretty straightforward. However the operating system test completely rocked me. While my beta exam scores came back with very high numbers, as an instructor I was thinking that maybe now would be a good time to go open a coffee cart in Mexico City for the tourists. |
I didn't at the time see how I can do a good job of teaching the operating system portion to taxicab drivers and crane operators. I waited to see what Sybex would come up with. The answer was nothing I would want to use in the classroom. I panicked. I looked high and low for courseware that would do a good job. It wasn't there. Under pressure from the shareholders to do *something* I designed my own books. Now these were not my first books, I had done a number of Microsoft and CompTIA titles for other publishers, including Sybex. |
However there was a big difference this time. I had a blank sheet of paper with no formula that I had to follow. I was free to apply everything I know about differences in human learning styles and memory retention. The resulting output is like nothing you've ever seen. For example, rather than blab on about different bus types such as ISA and PCI, my work goes into the background politics and egos that created this mess. So the work reads more like a fictional suspense novel except were talking about real companies and real products.
I pushed the envelope using them state-of-the-art digital photography, showing for example a cross-section of an 80486 CPU. The operating system work was equally radical. Just as in the classroom, I explained there are only two kinds of windows: DOS/FAT and NT/NFTS.
TcatU.net was rocking with incredible success rates. Well what goes up must come down. A 7.0 earthquake left TcatU.net holding the bag for millions of dollars worth of structural damage to the 65,000 square-foot building. We were toast.
With no further need for courseware it was handed to Total Recall Press who gives away for free from their servers. I’ll be straight with you and tell you in their conversion process they screwed up some of the fonts, formatting and even introduced a few technical errors. Well I'm sure as hell not going to go back and cleanup something that no longer meets my ever increasingly demanding standards. My new books from myself and the AlphaGeekProductions team will be out when they are out. |
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