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How to find what the search engine's won't let you see You can pick up a much cheaper 'used' copy of this book at Amazon
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Finding free information - ftp sites
Ftp files Ftp stands for File Transfer Protocol, and as the name suggests, it is merely a method of transferring data over a network. FTP does not relate to specific files, but how those files are transferred. So, steering clear of connecting to private ftp hubs because that’s just another form of peer-to-peer sharing and thus is probably going down the road of copyright infringement, ftp’ing for files from legitimate companies can be quite a good way of getting demo’s and other resources. If you want to you can get yourself a copy of an ftp client, but you can also do it through your browser (at least I know you can with Navigator and IE, but I’m not sure about Opera, Firefox etc,). This method is not very scientific as it’s mostly down to pot-luck, and to be honest, I end up spending way too many hours looking at other stuff than the study information I went looking for in the first place, but that’s another story. So, what I normally do is just go fishing. That is, I take a site like, say, Microsoft, and instead of typing in http://www.microsoft….., I type in ftp://ftp.microsoft.com Click on this link and you’ll see a bunch of folders similar in feel to your normal directory folders on your hard drive. What you’ll find in there is anyone’s guess, but if you do the same thing with likely computer study related companies (think in particular books and software etc) you’ll be surprised at what you can find. You’ll notice that the address starts with ftp://ftp……instead of the usual http://www… As I’ve said, it’s basically hit and miss as not all sites have this ftp directory set up and you’ll just have to try a whole bunch and see which ones let you in unless you want to get involved with newsgroups and the like and go hunting for anonymous ftp site listings. I find it’s just quicker to see if the sites that I’m interested in have such a server rather than sift through endless lists looking for sites which might be useful. You probably won’t find anything that you couldn’t get freely on the net anyhow, but you might turn up a few gems.
Without a doubt, just about everything that you need in terms of software, training, braindumps, cribsheets etc, can be found on a peer-to-peer network. Once again however, you need to know that you are probably contravening copyright law when downloading such material, so please be aware of that. It’s a fine line between sharing personal information and breaching copyright law, but having said that though there are many demos, personal study notes and other resources that are freely and legally available to be shared and the benefit of such peer-to-peer programs is that you can generally do all your shopping in one place (just like at Certification-Crazy ;-). Peer-to-peer
networks come and go all the time so I won’t list any here
but you can find them pretty easily just doing a basic search. I’m
told Direct Connect is pretty good though ;).
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The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook You can pick up a much cheaper 'used' copy of this book at Amazon
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