I went a funny path, MCSA 2003 upgraded to MCSA 2008 upgraded to MSCA 2012 and then did the exams to get MSCE 2012.
I stopped trusting the books back in the 2008 days. Nuggets are fantastic though. I also spent ages on TechNet and YouTube. I had a lab 'server' running Hyper-V on R2 with a bunch of VMs and tbh the biggest help was having an SSD, 16GB RAM and being able to install a VM from ISO in literally 2 minutes.
My routine was watch a nugget and make notes on keywords and stuff I didn't get - Google them and read articles, set up and play with stuff on VMs.
I found that taking the exam requirements and Googling each on was a good tactic too. Like the
410 has Features on Demand as a requirement. If you Google that you get TechNet articles. Google Keyword + tutorial or walkthrough and you'll normally find something you can follow in a lab. Every time I did a lab on a subject I made notes and drew diagrams so I didn't end up forgetting stuff or lose track of which VM was doing what.
The last two exams were really painful because there's a lot of system centre stuff and you have to know what all the system centre products are for and know how to work a lot of them and tie them together. Also, Microsoft logic
