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Rating: 
Summary: All you need for MOS certification for Project 2002
Review: I spent 2 months on this book, and practised using the trial software that came with the book. Believe me - that was all I needed to get certified. I just needed one attempt! No retaking business at all. I am now Microsoft Office Specialist in Microsoft Project 2002! I did not spend on any other training or books. This book deserves 5 stars and nothing less. Thanks to the authors who did a splendid job.
Rating: 
Summary: Anesthesized treatment
Review: I was disappointed by this book. Simply put I learned virtually nothing. Why? After all, the CD ROM's contents synchoronized with the book 99.9% of the time, and I easily recovered from the few errors there; there was probably only 3 typos in the book. It was written by a Microsoft Certified Professional and a Project Management Professional, so what could go wrong? This book was a recipe book, that's what. It explained virtually nothing. Microsoft Project 2002 is an abstract product. You're using views and tables all the time but the authors didn't explain what those views and tables were, how the the columns related to one another, what the contents of the columns meant, and so on. I was just blindly following instructions. While making mistakes isn't a good idea its one way of learning. By giving you completed files for every chapter, you don't learn, and that's what was wrong with this book. To give you an idea of what I mean, I had to look up how to connect tasks when I finished the book because I entered so few. This book was more like an extended tour of Project 2002 than an in-depth of tutorial. I just feel Microsoft had its hand in the preparation of the book and made sure the outcome was a "safe" treatment of the product. As such, I'm reluctant to buy Project Inside-Out. By the way, this book is about Project Standard, not Project Professional.
Rating: 
Summary: A Simple Intro for Project 2002...but you need more...
Review: I went through the book, cover to cover, word for word...doing all the examples whose files came from the included CD-ROM...never ran into any problems. Everything worked fine.
I guess I felt like a soldier marching through all the features in a logical progression. The book tells you what to type in step by step...introduces you to all the features (there is a lot that you can do with project 2002 besides manage your own project...eg., you can consolidate projects so that you have a project plan that contains other project plans that you can view and edit...you can create a VBA (Visual Basic Appliation) macro to run and update your HTML project plan...you can learn about Earned Value Analysis, which gives you additional insight into how your project is progressing (maybe similar to the internal rate of return used in Financial analysis to give you a report card on how well your investment is doing)...
I found the chapters were simple to step through and complete. The authors have a somewhat cut and dried tone that actually seems to suit the purpose at hand well, which is to drag you through all the features and details of project 2002 in a limited amount of space and time....And they do this in 369 pages (the chapters only, not the appendices) instead of over a 1000 pages as some books. So the book is for the beginner in Project, If you already have knowledge of project or read any other books on it, you'll want to find something more intermediate or advanced and this won't do it for you. I liked the book for keeping an even keel and not going off on any tangents...they had a goal to show you all the features and seem to accomplish that...Their treatment of many of the subjects in the book are elementary and you'll need to find other books eg., on VBA, to pursue it further.
What it purports to do is give you a step by step introductory knowledge of project 2002 with real world examples. So what doesn't it do? What it doesn't do is commit to showing you how to apply project management which is really what you want to do....knowing all the features is nice but show me a coherent "way" to put it into action...I think I need to get another book to do that.
Rating: 
Summary: Disapointing
Review: In a word disappointing. Microsoft Project can seem like a bewildering collection of data, options, and interrelationships to the new student. Step-by-step provides some context by going through many of the tasks that you would actually execute if you were using the tool to produce and manage a project schedule. However, it does not leave reader prepared to produce and manage a real schedule of his/her own.There is no discussion of strategies for schedules e.g. should you consider effort-controlled tasks, if you don't what's the best way to update your schedule, if you do what's the best way to update your schedule??? There is little discussion of "task types" and the pivotal role they play, how those choices impact updating the schedule, resource leveling, and incongruous operations that the tool will allow you to perform without protest. Perhaps because the producer of the software wrote the book there is absolutely no mention of the tool's shortcomings and how they can be avoided. After reading this book the reader will be able to create a schedule, but will probably become bogged down in difficulty if they try to manage a project by maintaining that schedule. I used the book as part of my study for the Microsoft Office Specialist exam. I found that I needed to do a lot of supplemental study in order to pass the test.
Rating:
Summary: Very good tutorial text for first-time users
Review: The Step-by-Step series on MS Project has been a staple for several years now. Don't expect a lot of advanced coverage, but the book is a solid starter book with clearly written instructions and a fairly engaging case-based set of exercises. Work through the exercises, though. It's a "hands-on" kind of book!
Rating:
Summary: Very good tutorial text for first-time users
Review: This book is designed to bring you up to speed on how to use the various features of Microsoft Project 2002, and it achieves that goal well. It contains a well written Appendix entitled "A Short Course in Project Management", and various "Project Management Focus" paragraphs throughout the book, but it is not really intended to teach you project management. For that, I suggest you read a project management text without a software focus, such as Project Management for Dummies by Stan Portny. Just as you would not expect a book on Microsoft Word to teach you how to write using good grammar, you should not expect this book on Microsoft Project to also teach you all you need to know about project management. I use this book to teach various Project 2002 courses, and I find it works well. However, a prerequiste for my classes is a project management theory class that uses only pen and paper. I have found this to be a powerful combination.
Rating:
Summary: Covers the breadth of features well
Review: This book is designed to bring you up to speed on how to use the various features of Microsoft Project 2002, and it achieves that goal well. It contains a well written Appendix entitled "A Short Course in Project Management", and various "Project Management Focus" paragraphs throughout the book, but it is not really intended to teach you project management. For that, I suggest you read a project management text without a software focus, such as Project Management for Dummies by Stan Portny. Just as you would not expect a book on Microsoft Word to teach you how to write using good grammar, you should not expect this book on Microsoft Project to also teach you all you need to know about project management. I use this book to teach various Project 2002 courses, and I find it works well. However, a prerequiste for my classes is a project management theory class that uses only pen and paper. I have found this to be a powerful combination.
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