Corydon's CompTIA A+ Study Guide sells 1,200 copies in just 3 months, becomes #2 best-seller in the IT certification space!

The CompTIA A+ Study Guide for Pros has sold 1,200 copies in its first three months on sale, placing it second among IT certification titles and making it the fastest-selling book Corydon has published.

The guide covers the full A+ objective set across two volumes — Core 1 for hardware, networking, mobile devices and virtualisation, and Core 2 for operating systems, security, software troubleshooting and operational procedures. Both are available in paperback and as Corydon ebooks in the CertLabz reader.

Why it landed

Reader feedback points repeatedly at the same three things: the objective-by-objective structure that mirrors the exam blueprint, the troubleshooting walkthroughs written from real bench experience, and the decision to cut filler rather than pad the page count.

“Passed CompTIA A+ on the first try using just the Corydon study guide. Clear, concise, no fluff.”

— Tom Bradley, IT Specialist

What comes next

Both A+ volumes are now bundled with the PenTest+ All-in-One Study Guide as the CompTIA Pros Complete Bundle. Companion one-page exam cheat sheets for each volume are available separately, and further certification titles are in production.

A crowded shelf

The A+ certification is one of the most heavily published exams in technology. Any candidate walking into a bookshop or scrolling a storefront faces a wall of competing guides, most of them long-established and several of them running to well over a thousand pages. Entering that market as a newer publisher meant the book had to be different in a way a reader could recognise within the first few pages, not merely cheaper.

The decision was to optimise for the reader sitting the exam rather than for shelf presence. Page count is a poor proxy for value, and much of the bulk in competing titles comes from restating vendor documentation. Corydon’s editorial brief was the opposite: cover every objective, prove every claim against current hardware and software behaviour, and cut anything that survives only out of habit.

Built around the blueprint

Both volumes are structured objective by objective, in the order CompTIA publishes them. A candidate who wants to know whether they are ready for domain 5 of Core 1 can turn to that section, read it, attempt the questions and get an honest answer. That sounds obvious, but many guides organise around narrative themes instead, which reads pleasantly and makes exam-day gap analysis considerably harder.

The troubleshooting material was written from bench experience rather than from theory. Failure modes are presented the way they actually arrive — as ambiguous symptoms with several plausible causes — and the reasoning that narrows them down is spelled out rather than asserted. Readers repeatedly single this out as the section that changed how they approached the performance-based questions.

What readers said

Feedback across the first quarter clustered tightly around three points: the structure mirrored the exam, the writing did not pad, and the practical sections matched what candidates met in the test centre. Several readers reported passing having used no other primary resource.

Where it goes from here

Both A+ volumes are now available in paperback at $49.99 and as Corydon ebooks at $29.99, or together with the PenTest+ All-in-One Study Guide as the CompTIA Pros Complete Bundle — $135 for all three paperbacks or $80 for the three ebooks. Companion one-page exam cheat sheets condensing each volume’s domains are available separately, and further certification titles are in production for release across the coming year.

How the two volumes divide the work

Core 1 covers mobile devices, networking, hardware, virtualisation and cloud computing, and hardware and network troubleshooting. Core 2 covers operating systems, security, software troubleshooting and operational procedures. Candidates must pass both, and the most common scheduling mistake is treating them as one continuous body of material rather than two separate exams with two separate blueprints.

The guides are written so either volume can be read first, but the recommended order is Core 1 then Core 2, because the hardware and networking grounding in the first makes several of the operating-system and security topics in the second land more cleanly. Each volume stands alone for candidates who have already passed one half and need only the other.

What the reviews kept returning to

Across the first quarter, the feedback was unusually consistent. Readers cited the absence of padding more often than any other single quality — a striking result in a category where thickness is often mistaken for thoroughness. Several noted that they had abandoned a competing title partway through and finished the Corydon guide in a fraction of the time, with better retention.

The second recurring theme was trust in the technical detail. Every claim in both volumes was verified against current hardware and software behaviour rather than reproduced from vendor documentation, and readers who work in the field noticed. A guide that describes a fault the way it actually presents itself on a bench earns credibility that no amount of page count can buy.

A note on the sales figure

Twelve hundred copies in three months is not a large number by trade-publishing standards, and it is worth being precise about what it represents. IT certification is a specialist category with a defined audience, and the ranking reflects performance within that category rather than against general non-fiction. What makes the figure meaningful is the pace: the book reached second place without a marketing budget, on the strength of reader recommendation.