I have to put my hands up here and say that I have also done the official SA courses run by Sun and do have some (admittedly limited) experience with sysadmin work in a large environment.

That having been, said this book is largely responsible for my passing both exams as the information in the book was clearly laid out by technical authors with real world experience. The only two grumbles I have are that the CD is largely useless as the questions are in some cases misleading due to giving you wrong answers and in some of the later chapters in the SA2 section, the authors start to contradict themselves. The quality of the information in the chapters' of both sections of the book is largely dependant on that chapter's author and as a whole the later chapters can be frustrating if you know that what you are reading is wrong.

As long as you mix this with something like Sun's official SA guides, then you should find that you have comprehensive coverage of the SA exam topics

However the CD is total rubbish. If you sit the exam practice exam and get a surprisingly low score, you will probably find that it's because there are some wrong answers in there and some answers which fail to match the question asked.

One example of this was a question that asked "Which of the following is NOT a potential reason for the rmdir command failing", yet the supposed correct answer were all the reasons why it WOULD fail. Then there's an absurd question about moving blocks of text in vi, that suggests the correct way to do it is to yank a block of text, paste it and then delete the original block. My answer that you simply 'dd' the block and paste it elsewhere was marked wrong on the basis that the block is deleted and therefore nothing can be pasted. This is WRONG. In the Vi editor with Solaris 2.6. 7 and 8, 'dd' deletes the text AND copies it to a buffer.

I could go through all the incorrect answers, but if the creators of the CD couldn't be bothered to check their work properly, I can't be bothered to list all their mistakes. What is infuriating is that in all the time since this book has been pulished, there are no updates that correct these questions.

This spoils what would otherwise be an excellent book (hence the 4 stars) as there's then no realistic way to prepare yourself for the real exam.

Before reading the book I attempted a few practise exams, my results were okay, but not brilliant. After reading the book and doing the practise questions at the end of each chapter, my results were better .... but I found that I had to use other sources of information to fill in the gaps between 'better' and satisfactory.

Basically I'd recommend the book, due to it's reasonable coverage of the objectives, and easy reading. But I'd be aware that the contents of the book might not give you enough information to pass unless you are an experienced Solaris administrator.