Background: I had read entire andy 3 years back but stopped there. Again, read andy from July1-July23rd. Then took an ESI PMP prep bootcamp class paid by my company from July 23-27. Helped me start thinking logically as a PM. Although I have 5 years of PM experience by my organization is more functional type so not much experience was adding value.

Realized during the class, that pmbook is important. Did a mock test in July end, Rita's (i had old software from 3 years back when i was preparing, so i continued to use Rita's v5.) I scored 65% in my first mock test. was not so happy. Then read the ESI material from the class, which is nothing but pmbook but in more bulleted format. Read that, quick review of andy at same time. Took more tests. All this over august. August end tried another rita mock test, score now was 75%. so was happy.

You can say i was pretty much obsessed with PMP preparation. I have a 4 year old so was very hard to study. In july only studied 1 hour on weekdays and 4 hours ob weekends. In august studied 2 hours on weekdays and 8 hours on weekends, then in september studied 4-5 hours on weekdays and 10 hours on weekends. Mostly in sep re-read ESI material, never touched Andy again. Did many mock tests (you can get a list from pmzilla), continuously was reading pmzilla forum. Read articles online. Started thinking like a PMP to apply knowledge learnt. As i re-read from ESI material, i started reading from pmbook. I didn't read all chapters except for HR and procurement once. But read pmbook chapter 1-3 manier times. This time did questions from Rita's FT for each know area. So in all covered maybe 1500 questions. At this point surprisingly my most weak area was professional responsibility and i accepted the risk of not doing so well there. I had tried everything to improve but my scores were never in 80% in this area. Rita's i was scoring mid 70s to mid 80s.

After all this preparation 15 days before the exam i took pmstudy test1. heard great things about it. Before the test, i had told myself this is my benchmark of preparation, If i score well here that means i am prepared to take the test. I was very happy with the scores here as i had 80%. Then in the next 5 days, i re-read the ESI material (this time maybe 3rd or 4th time, i can't even remember). Took so many tests. Had downloaded apps on phone since beginning of preparation and would use iphone to prepare while waiting at pharmacy or waiting at my daughter's swimming class. Whenever i would get time between my meetings at work, i would do questions.

One thing i realized in my preparation, in august when i was taking tests if i would get answers wrong i would just read the explanation in the software and try to make a note of the right answer in my mind and sometimes on a paper to read later again. However, this is good but i realized its more of memorizing the answer than understanding it, In september, if i would get a wrong answer for e.g. the questions is about configuration management, then i would go to pmbook and try to find all the pages where its referred to and read all the pages. Basically if my answer was wrong, then i would read about that particular topic and also did search for that topic on pmzilla to find more information. So even if the software's answer was enough to understand but i would read more and more. This was i realized i ended up covering a lot of pmbook.

So now I had 9 more days to go. And guess what, I am very bad at 
taking tests under pressure. During the last 9 days, I took pmzilla test, pmsrudy test 3.

So my advice to you, start reading an easy book, and then read pmbook it will become interesting. I actually like reading pmbook now, even though I have not read the entire book. But i kept looking at the flow diagrams for each process whenever i wanted to understand the flow of ITTOs.

Do as many tests as possible, but dont memorize the explanations. You get wrong answer, read the entire topic on that from atleast 2 books and if needed search online. My brother took the exam 4 years back. He just read Andy and did Rita's FT and passed :) SO it all depends. 

In my opinion, read pmbook as many times as you can. I read chapters 1-4, Risk, Quality, Procurement many many times. And HR and Comm just once. Also used my ESI material which is nothing but pmbok.

I stopped taking tests 4 days before, in the last 4 days, just read the same pages again and again. Day before the exam infact i studied the least. I was super bored and exhausted. I relaxed and slept on time.

On the day of exam, revised the whole material within two hours, ate light food, and was at the center 30 minutes before the exam. The exam was so much like pmstudy 3. 

I felt the math questions were complicated. I marked around 25 questions for review but had only 11 minutes left to review them. I might have only been able to review 50% of marked questions. And all in all, I passed with 4P and 1MP.

Rita's FT CD questions, very good for situational questions. And pmstudy good to check if you are ready for the exam.
Let me know if you need more information. You can contact me by sending an email via pmzilla.

Thanks,

Shweta