Last Friday I passed the last of my CBIP exams - the IS Core one.
I got 71%, just above the "Mastery" threshold - great! :)
I was quite dreading this exam; however in the end I found it relatively easy. Right after the exam I thought I would get about 80% of the answers right but nevertheless I was happy with my result.
In terms of preparation material, this exam is a tricky one. It is really large in scope so you can't really prepare in-depth in all of the examination areas.
My strategy was to 1) rely on my experience, 2) make sure I knew the examination topics as per the CBIP exam guide. For the areas I didn't know, I looked up the topics on Wikipedia. I saved a bunch of exam-relevant articles as a .pdf file. You can download it here: Link
I also read one book - Laudon: Management Information Systems. The book wasn't bad but it is more of a course book for college students. The book is very broad in scope and doesn't dig too much into detail. Some chapters on the topics I haven't much touched on before were useful to me but if you have practical experience in most of them, the book will not teach you much. I went through most of it and at the end, I have to admit, I was quite glad it was over.
So there it is. I'm very happy that i did this certification. I honestly learned a lot from it and it should look nice on my CV :).
Good luck to you if you're in the process of preparing for the exams. Let me know if you have any specific questions, I'd be happy to help.
