Each chapter begins with a handful of questions. The idea behind this technique is that if you know the answers to a chapter's opening questions, you need not spend much time studying it. The chapters' conclusions really prove useful: Exercises are guided tours through specific procedures, while review questions provide a multiple-choice quiz.

Overall, the authors' writing styles and other means of communicating information to the reader are very good. They typically walk through the Microsoft-specified exam objectives one by one, spending relatively little time on broad concepts and focusing instead on detailed procedures. A couple of illustrations come across as gigantically silly (the one showing a man spreading his arms wide to illustrate the "bigger" partitions supported by NT file server seems especially dumb). More tables of facts would help those who need to learn material in a hurry.