The text covers all elements of each exam, beginning with processors, memory, and other hardware subsystems before progressing through troubleshooting techniques and the fundamentals of MS-DOS and Windows 95.
Though each chapter concludes with some useful practice questions, this book tends to fail with its sample hardware photographs. They're dark and amateurish, and it's rarely clear what you're supposed to notice--a picture of a whole motherboard labeled "ZIF socket" isn't helpful, and neither is a picture of PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports misidentified as USB ports.
The CD-ROM contains a program called Beachfront Quizzer, which simulates the format of the A+ exams neatly and does a good job of tracking your answers. It's integrated with the text too. When a Quizzer user requests help with a question, the program brings up a quick answer, plus a hyperlinked reference to the relevant chapter of the book text on the disc. It would be better if the hyperlinks led to specific sections of the text rather than requiring the test taker to scroll through a whole chapter.
By the way, the codes you need to unlock Quizzer appear in the "ReadMe First.txt" file in the CD-ROM's BFQUIZ folder. IDG Books should have made this more obvious. --David Wall