Here is review of another PMP exam prep book I posted to Amazon.com

I am amazed so many people liked this book.  It shows the power of marketing and advertising.  I bought this book based on verbal recommendations from coworkers and members of my local PMI chapter and was very surprised at how quickly I came away feeling that I was misled. I have three major issues with the book.

1) It is overly wordy yet still leaves you needing the PMBOK guide as well to make sure you have all the inputs and outputs for processes covered.  The book is at the opposite spectrum from the PMBOK guide which has too few words.  Perhaps a merger of the two books would be the optimal solution.  The entire book has the look and feel of a rapidly written 1st draft.

2) The exercises are not really exercises at all.  In most cases an “exercise” is simply a question such as “What do you think you would need to know or have before you initiate a project?”  You are given 10 blank lines to fill in your answer.  Another frequently used exercise is to ask you to list all the actions for a process.  Again you are given some blank space to write your answers as if this is a workbook.  This is followed by a table containing the “answers” with a column for you to check off the activities that you currently do in your own project management.  The suggestion is that you only need to study the items you don’t check off.  No consideration is given to how well you perform the activity in real life.  You might execute it in an extremely poor fashion and think you know it yet if you try to answer exam questions on the topic you will find you have no idea what activity is really all about.

3) The final major issue I have is with the tone of the book.  At times there is a childlike attitude toward the reader.  For example there are several times in the book where the author states a “trick of the trade” and then writes “Now aren’t you glad you bought this book?”  Too bad every time she asks this in the book my answer is: “No!”

As much as I am tempted to give the book only one star I have to admit that if I had to choose between the PMBOK guide and this book I would have to go with Rita’s book mostly because Rita’s book does provide some useful insight to the exam itself that you do not get form the PMBOK