A friend recommended this book to me as the only material I need for the PMP examination.

I have only had the book for a few days but it has become my travelling companion on my daily commute to and from the office. I can't just put it down as it is so reader-friendly. The examination questions at the end of each chapter are good practice materials as they invaraibly expose your knowledge gap, forcing you to go through the chapter again to review important information that you missed the first time. I recommend the book to everyone who is serious about knowing the subject matter indepth and hopefully passing the PMP examination the first time. Segun A. (London)
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Lessons learned after the PMP exam, 26 May 2011 By Panda "_panda" (Mnchen) - See all my reviews This review is from: PMP Exam Prep: Rapid Learning to Pass PMI's PMP Exam-On Your First Try!
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I passed the PMP exam in May 2011 (first attempt) and got Proficient in all areas. My experience is that you can get a very good foundation by reading Rita's book and most importantly, doing the exercises in there and then using the free sample exams floating around the net to identify gaps and then going back to the PMBOK book and reading up on the gaps. All in all, I spent about 1 month learning for the exam. The sample exam that I think was nearest to the real exam was the free one one from Head First (google: Head First PMP practice exam), so if you ace that one you're prepared to take the real exam. Before I read Rita's book, I learned her Rita's Process Chart by heart, which lists in more detail the PMBOK processes from p. 43 of the PMBOK and which was very useful in understanding the rest of the book and it also made me sure about answering some questions in the exam :-) Very important was learning - by heart - all the Tools&Techniques (T&T) and all their sub-components of all processes and dumping them on paper at the start of the exam (you get 15 minutes at the start before the time starts running in which you get a tutorial on how the exam works). The problem is, you also have to understan d what exactly they are and how they work, so for the ones you don't know look them up in Wikipedia and get to understand them. I used a flow chart by Konstantin Trunin (to get it, google: Konstantin Trunin PMP) showing all of them on one huge page and to get the overview and then invented mnemonics to remember them, e.g. for the T&T "Information gathering techniques" in "Identify risks", I used BIRD (Brainstorming, Interviewing, Root-cause analysis, Delphi), or in "Develop Team", BIT GReCo = Team -Building, Interpersonal skills, Training, Ground rules, Recognition and rewards, Co -location. Repeated the mnemonics to myself each night before going to sleep, better than counting sheep :-) The idea is that that there will be enough questions with uncertain a nswers (i.e. open to interpretation) in the exam so that it's best to gather points wherever you can from sure answers and by learning these off by heart you will get some "sure" points in the exam.

Learning material I used: - Rita's book: I read her book twice, once attentively and did all her exercises and the questiosn after each chapter, and then I skimmed it again 2 days before the exam. Rita's "Tricks of the trade" are scattered all over the book and her tips for the exam on p. 1719 and her "Putting it all together" on p. 505 -519. - PMBOK: I only read the PMBOK after I had read Rita's book and read parts that weren't described that well in Rita's book so that I understood them. I skimmed it again the day before the exam, especially looking at all the general pictures. Also very useful from the PMBOK was p. 350-351 showing the difference between Project Documents and the Project Management Plan and what exactly is contained in a charter or a Scope statement (those things appeared in Rita's book, bu t it was nice to have them all together again on one page). The day before the exam I also went through the glossary in the PMBOK (p. 426 - 453) to check that I had understood all the terms correctly. - Trunin's flow chart with the whole PMBOK on 1 page. Printed it out and scribbled my mnemonics on it. - PMI code of Ethics (from the PMI web site). There were several questions in my exam from that only on the word-to-word content (plus several others on your general sense of ethics), so I would read that one very carefully. After having read both Rita's book and the PMBOK once, I started doing sample exams to identify any gaps I had. Sample exams I did (best listed first): - Head First's 200 question free sample exam. Did it the day before the exam an d scored 83% on it. Was most like the real exam both in content and in the fact that the real exam didn't have long wordy scenarios. All questions were 4 lines or less. - Cornelius Fichtner's free 3 x 30 questions (only a 3_day trial, so do them after you sign up!) in his exam simulator (google: Fichtner PMP free exam simulator) He also sells 90-day access to the PMP exam simulator with 1,800 questions for 89.99$ (would have bought it but I discovered him just 2 days before the exam and I wouldn't have had time anyway to for them) and has a nice blog about the PMP exam. He also sells his video pod casts for 99.97$ (with a 90 -day money back guarantee). - Did not use because I found it too late (but has good reviews): Edwel's free 200 question sample exam (google: Edwel free PMP practice exam) In summary, the best things to do for the exam: - take one week off before the exam and do nothing else but PMP - learn Tools&Techniques, Rita's chart by heart - do as many sample exams as you can lay your hands on and have time for - do not take the real exam until you score over 80% on Head First's sample exam - while some of the questions need you to be very exact when reading the scenario, others are written by people who apparently don't know what's written in the PMBOK now. So sometimes you have to very exact and sometimes you have to accept that their questions aren't that exact and shake your head at PMI's editing practices. The type of questions varies and you see that many authors (of varying expertise!) contributed exam questions. - in the exam questions sometimes they show network diagrams starting at 0 days (like in Rita's book), sometimes ones following the other method with starting at day 1. So don't get disconcerted by that. - get a good night's sleep before the exam so that you are fresh when you take it (some questions are tricky and misleading!)