Why am I writing a review of a certification guide for a deprecated version of DB2?



I think this is still a useful reference if you happen to own it. I used this to prepare for my own certification exam for V8.1 (exams 700, 701) seven years ago, and I passed using it. It works despite its flaws. It covers all important functional DBA areas. I wouldn't buy it now but if you have it don't throw it out.



I agree with other reviewers that there is an unacceptable number of typos and errors in this book, and that both the Table of Contents and Index contain puzzling omissions making them far less useful (e.g. why is dropped table recovery on page 650 missing from both the Index and Table of Contents?). The authors needed a much stronger team of pre-publication reviewers. Furthermore, this guide contains much info that predates version 8. However the argument could be made that if you are doing the 700/701 exams you need to know everything up to and including version 8.



There were times as well where I felt that the Control Center graphics were useless padding for the text. The certification exams never ask about the Control Center GUI. This could have been a much tighter book without the screen prints.



I hope that IBM recognizes in the future that sloppy editing reflects badly on their products. The company needs to put more energy into making sure that these certification guides are top rate.