Before You Begin

Before you begin studying for the exam, it's imperative that you understand a few things about the RFID+ certification. RFID+ is a certification-for-life from CompTIA granted to those who obtain a passing score on a single exam.

When you're studying for any exam, the first step in preparation should always be to find out as much as possible about the test; the more you know up front, the better you can plan your study. The current exam number, and the one this book is written to, is RF0-001; it consists of 81 questions. You have 90 minutes to take the exam, and the passing score is 630 on a scale from 100 to 900. Both Pearson VUE and Thomson Prometric testing centers administer the exam throughout the United States and several other countries.

The exam is multiple choice, sometimes with short, terse questions followed by four possible answers, sometimes with lengthy scenarios and relatively complex solutions. This is an entry-level exam of knowledge-level topics and it expects you to know a great deal about RFID topics from an overview perspective but also their implementation. In many books, the glossary is filler added to the back of the text; this book's glossary should be considered necessary reading.

You should also know that CompTIA is notorious for including vague questions on all its exams. You might see a question for which two of the possible four answers are correct-but you can only choose one. Use your knowledge, logic, and intuition to choose the best answer, and then move on. Sometimes the questions are worded in ways that would make English majors cringe-a typo here, an incorrect verb there. Don't let this frustrate you; answer the question and go to the next. Although I haven't intentionally added typos or other grammatical errors, the questions throughout this book make every attempt to re-create the structure and appearance of the real exam questions. CompTIA offers a page on study tips for the exam at http://certification.comptia.org/rfid/default.aspx, and it is worth skimming.

Note 

In addition, CompTIA frequently includes "item seeding," which is the practice of including unscored questions on exams. The reason they do that is to gather psychometric data, which is then used when developing new versions of the exam. Before you take the exam, you are told that your exam may include unscored questions. In addition, if you come across a question that does not appear to map to any of the exam objectives-or for that matter, is not covered in this exam-it is likely a seeded question.