Esri ArcGIS Desktop Associate Certification Study Guide: For 10.5 Second Edition

My employer purchased this book to help me with my studies for the Associate certification exam, and it helped me immensely. It covers all the material you need to know, and I was well prepared. I don’t think I would have passed without this. It helps so much to have something like this to focus your studies so that you aren’t stressing over things that won’t be on the exam. Thank you so much for publishing this. I’m looking forward to the Professional exam study guide in the near future!

I guess the fault is partially mine for not checking the page count, but this is an incredibly sparse study guide. It just outlines topics and says which web courses you should take and ArcMap help topics you should read to learn them. It doesn’t include any actual topic information, practice questions, or example challenges to work through. I can’t believe they are charging so much money for such a useless resource. It might be worth considering if it were priced at $20, but it’s definitely not worth any more than that.

This book was exactly what I was looking for in a study guide. It provided just the right information so that I could identify my weak areas and study more efficiently. I especially appreciated the practice resources and the opportunities to check my current knowledge and skills. I would have struggled to pass the Desktop Associate certification exam without this study guide!

I am an owner of the first study guide for the Desktop Associates exam by Miriam Schmidts. It is an excellent reference book, and one of the two books that I recommend to new users. My employer sprung for the cost of an exam voucher recently, so I bought the digital version of this new guide. Wow. Where the first book had complete coverage of everything you need to know about ArcGIS Desktop (at 381 pages), this edition is more like a supplement than anything I would call a book or guide. It has six chapters, and nearly every section refers to the help docs for actual content. It is legit a collection of links to online help documents and their online training. Here's how it's structured: 1-2 paragraphs of explanation followed by reference to help documentation, a task or two for you to complete based on the help docs you just had to read, and sometimes ending with recommended web courses to gain a better understanding of the thing it's supposed to be explaining to you. Not only is the lack of actual content offensive, but the price of this ridiculous guide is laughable. Grab the topics from the table of contents and look everything up yourself. Don't be suckered into buying this thing. Get Miriam's guide and just read the online documentation to get the changes from 10.0/10.1 to whatever version you're using.