Book review – ITIL® Practitioner Guidance, Book By AXELOS, ISBN-10: 0113314876
First up let me point out that this is a book you are unlikely to purchase on a whim – its a required set book for the ITIL Practitioner exam and that is the reason why I bought it. If you don’t know what ITIL is go to Wikipedia and have a read. What this book does is provide the references you will need in the exam, and you definitely do not want to read it like a novel, though it is only 166 pages long, its not a cover to cover book.
Does it do what it sets out do? Yes, within this book is all the information you will require to have at hand during the exam. What it will not do is stand alone as the only source of information for the subject, so do not think you can just get the book, have a read and you will pass the exam, you will need to either attend a course or do online structured learning and this book will supplement that learning.
Are there faults? Oh yes, the contents is not deep enough, in the exam you are under pressure and you do not want to have to find the headline topic in the contents and then have to skim through to find the sub-heading you are looking for – there is space at the start of each chapter for a separate contents page for that chapter and that is the minimum they should do, in the end I wrote my own in pencil in the book (you are permitted to make as many annotations as you like in the book before the exam but you are not allowed to add lose leaves of paper in)
Any other improvements that could be made? Yes, the toolkit chapter is laid out in what is, in my opinion, the most random order imaginable – I am unsure how Agile, Kanban, Lean and DevOps fit into Organisational Change Management, but that is where they have been placed within the toolkit chapter.
The traditional marks out of 5? 4. The price is a bit of a scam – £60 for a set book feels like they are taking advantage of the student, especially as it is only 166 pages long, that is 36p per page which is not cheap. The content is all there but the layout and ordering definitely could be improved. There is not much point in saying whether or not I would recommend it – it is the set book and you have to have it when you sit the exam.