How This Book Is Organized

Although this book can be read cover to cover, it is designed to be flexible and allow you to easily move between chapters and sections of chapters to cover only the material that you need more work with. Chapters 1 through 18 are the core chapters and can be covered in any order, though some chapters are related and build upon each other. If you do intend to read them all, the order in the book is an excellent sequence to use.

When you finish with the core chapters, you have several options on how to finish your exam preparation. Chapter 19, "Scenarios for Final Preparation," provides many scenarios to help you review and refine your knowledge, without giving you a false sense of preparedness that you would get with simply reviewing a set of multiple-choice questions. You can review the questions at the end of each chapter, and you can use the CD-ROM testing software to practice the exam.

Each core chapter covers a subset of the topics on the BCMSN exam. The core chapters are organized into parts. The core chapters cover the following topics: