Questions about ICCP exams - Calling all IT/MIS Students

[lwmcc]

Well, now I'm even more shocked.

After calling ICCP and registering (she person on the phone wrote down all my information including credit card info with a pencil, and it will be 'data entried' tomorrow!!) I went on the Bird Publication site for prep materials.

They have an ordinary online store. I bought the prep materials, checked out, got my confirmation, then realized I had never paid!

I called the customer service number but got a very personal sounding answering machine ('you've reached the Bird family'). So, I sent an email. I got an email back saying that they will create an Ebay auction just for this individual purchase, and that once they get confirmation from Ebay they will manually create me a user/password on an FTP server so that /I can download my stuff!

Hmm.. Working with ICCP and Bird it's hard to imagine that these exams are gonna be meaningful or well written. It's 1999 all over again!

Okay, I'm not an IT/MIS student, but I have been a paid professional in the IT field for 20 years. I've just gotta ask - given the unbelievable lack of technology described above, you're going to trust their study materials for a technical test? I mean, really, if they can't even get realtime EDI right on their own website when most of the major backend providers provide easy-to-integrate APIs, how well can you trust their version of technical study materials?

Why not just go to Amazon and buy a used textbook on the subject? Most courses/tests of this nature are on 'slightly stale' technology anyway, so an inexpensive used textbook would likely cover the material more than adequately. Plus, if you've got a formal textbook to study from and get an answer wrong on the test that you got from the textbook, you'd have grounds to protest the answer being marked wrong. Just a question, not knowcing what may be a viable study source, but I just can't imagine trusting to their version of technical guidance....