SharePoint Certifications & Microsoft E-Learning

Just passed my 70-541 and 70-542, now I'm fully MCTS'ed on SharePoint Application Development. While I am sworn to secrecy on what is on those exams, I can tell you how I studied. I read:

• Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Development Unleashed
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: The Complete Reference
• Microsoft E-learning Collection 6071.

SharePoint Unleashed is great up until the chapters on webservices, which get a little monotonous. The MOSS: Complete Reference book on the other hand is excellent for an overall knowledge of configuring SharePoint, which is partially mirrored in the Object Model; if you haven't spent a lot of time getting your hands dirty with SharePoint I would suggest this book as the next best thing. It also contains some basic code samples that help round out what is gleaned from the Unleashed book.

I had a lot of trouble purchasing the courses, so a tip for registration with E-Learning that might help, especially if you have your Live ID integrated into every Microsoft Site on the Internet. You might get an error message repeatedly while trying to purchase a course on the E-Learning site; the particular error I experienced occurred the step following acceptance of the TOS, a very descriptive "an error has occurred" kind of error. I thought it was an outage but a day later I was still getting the same error. To side-step this issue, sign up for a new Live ID with an email that you've NEVER used with Microsoft before. I think the registration process tries to pull up information off of your Live ID from several sources and ends up choking on it. Aside from that, the E-Learning courses are great for preparing for the exams. Really. This is probably the best experience I've had with Microsoft, plus I can use the courses as reference materials for another year-and-a-half, and there is some really good material on there.