Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

To get straight to the point - I passed on 10 April. Having said that, this was not my only training resource (I also used "A Cloud Guru" and "Linux Academy," both online video training sites). But what this book did do was give me the ability to sit down and read, at my own pace, and fill in the gaps inevitably left by the videos. YES, this book was written for the old interface. It doesn't mean you can't find anything on AWS now. In fact, if UI changes have completely derailed your study of the AWS CSA-A syllabus, then you're probably going to have trouble passing the exam anyway. It's not easy, even the Associate level. I am not a developer, I am a sysadmin. I will quickly become an obsolete dinosaur if I do not get up to speed on the "Dev" side of "DevOps", at least to a baseline degree of competency, and on the world's largest cloud platform. Amazon changes things on AWS at a frightening pace. No book ever published is going to be able to keep up with those changes. But the mechanics, the fundamentals, the underlying frameworks, are still the same. This book will teach you those. I highly recommend you also use a video training course. The video courses I used are for the 2017 exam - and you will never be tested on the UI itself. Having trained for the 2017 exam, I also agreed to take a beta exam (because it was 50% off) when registering on WebAssessor. The exam I took was 80 questions, instead of 60, and included questions on Kinesis, as well as making a clear distinction between NAT Gateways and NAT instances. Lots of VPC questions, lots of EC2, lots of RDS. Bottom line - don't rely on only a single source for study, especially on a platform as vast and complex as AWS. I became very frustrated a few days before my exam. Frankly, I didn't expect to pass. It didn't help that the staff at the Kryterion testing center had never given an Amazon exam before and I saw them refer to handwritten notes repeatedly (!!). You will not receive any sort of hardcopy confirmation that you passed from the testing center, so if they're not really sure what they're doing, stick around and make sure it gets submitted properly. I had an email from Kryterion waiting on me when I arrived home with a PDF of my certificate and the Certified AWS logos you're entitled to use once you pass. I don't even know if I'll receive a paper certificate in the mail! But if you study hard and you do the labs, you can pass. I'm living proof of that.