How to study for A+ without buying anything first

Almost every A+ study plan starts by recommending something to buy. This one starts by pointing out that the two most important study documents are free, published by the organisation that writes the exam, and downloaded by a minority of candidates.

Step one: read the objectives before anything else

CompTIA publishes a full exam objectives document for each half of A+ V15, as a PDF, from the certification pages. The page asks for an email address. That is the entire cost.

This matters more than it sounds. Every other study resource in existence is somebody's interpretation of those documents. The documents themselves are the specification the exam is written against, which means a gap between a course and the objectives is always the course's problem.

Step two: spend your hours where the marks are

The objectives come with weightings, and they should decide your schedule. Core 1 is 28% hardware and network troubleshooting, 25% hardware, 23% networking, 13% mobile devices and 11% virtualization and cloud computing.

So more than half of Core 1 — troubleshooting plus hardware — is about physical machines and what goes wrong with them. Reading about that is the least efficient way to learn it. Core 2 is 28% operating systems, 28% security, 23% software troubleshooting and 21% operational procedures.

Operational procedures is the one people underweight. Documentation, change management, safety and backup and recovery are not interesting, they are over a fifth of the exam, and they are very learnable — which makes them the cheapest marks on the paper.

Step three: the free video course

Professor Messer publishes a complete free video course for each half of A+ V15. Core 1 is 63 videos running 10 hours and 11 minutes. Core 2 is 74 videos running 13 hours and 41 minutes. The course index states that all of the training videos are completely free to watch.

That is roughly 24 hours of structured teaching covering every objective, at no cost. This site earns nothing from recommending it — there is no partner programme behind it — and it is still the first recommendation on the page. His downloadable course notes and practice exams are separate products he sells; the videos are not.

Step four: the part no video can do

A+ includes performance-based questions: simulated tasks rather than multiple-choice items. CompTIA lists them among the question types for both halves. You cannot watch your way through those.

What actually builds the skill, roughly in order of usefulness:

1. An old desktop you are allowed to take apart. RAM, storage, power supply, cooling, cables, connectors. Core 1's hardware domain is 25% of that exam and it is muscle memory.
2. A cheap router or an old one from a drawer. SOHO network setup, IP addressing, wireless configuration, and the diagnostic tools that go with them.
3. Virtual machines on whatever you already own. Core 2 asks about Windows, macOS and Linux. Installing all three in a hypervisor costs nothing and covers a large part of the operating systems domain.
4. Somebody else's broken computer. Troubleshooting is 28% of Core 1 and 23% of Core 2 in its software form, and the exam tests the method, not the answer.

Step five: decide whether to pay, and for what

By this point you know your weak domains, which is the only sound basis for spending money. Two things are worth paying for and neither is a substitute for the above.

The first is simulated performance-based practice. CompTIA's own CertMaster Practice is described as timed practice exams, objective quizzes and objective mastery scores, with an estimated duration of 10 to 20 hours per exam on CompTIA's product table. The second is a course that imposes an order on you if you cannot impose one on yourself — Udemy's CompTIA A+ topic page, read 24 September 2026, lists full Core 1 and Core 2 courses sold with practice exams attached.

Whatever you buy, check what is allowed before you study from it. Which practice material is legitimate sets out CompTIA's own test, and the sanctions for getting it wrong.

What free material does not cover

Being fair to the paid options means naming where the free route thins out, and there are three places. Simulated performance-based questions are the largest: free video explains what a task involves but does not put you in an interface and mark what you did. Structured spaced repetition is the second — free material gives you the content in order once, not a schedule that brings it back at intervals. The third is simply accountability, which sounds soft and is the reason most self-study plans stall in week five.

None of those gaps is about information. Every objective CompTIA publishes is covered somewhere free. The gaps are about practice conditions and about being made to keep going, and it is entirely reasonable to pay for those two things once you have established that the free route has taken you as far as it can.

Two habits that save a retake

The first is to read the objectives document as a checklist rather than as reading matter. Every bullet in it is a thing the exam may ask about, phrased by the people who will ask. Working through it line by line at the end, marking each bullet as confident or not, produces a far more accurate picture of readiness than any practice percentage — because the practice engine is somebody's guess at the exam and the objectives are the exam's specification.

The second is to learn the vocabulary out loud. A large share of both halves is recognising the right term for a thing you already understand: the connector, the protocol, the Windows tool, the documentation artefact. Being able to describe a process correctly to somebody else is a much better test of that than reading a list of terms and feeling that they look familiar.

Neither habit costs anything, and between them they address the two ways people usually fail — an untouched domain nobody noticed, and a confident half-knowledge of terms that collapses under a precisely worded question.

A schedule that fits around a job

Then book. Both exams must be the same version, and you can sit them in either order — the A+ page has the rules, the two pass marks and the renewal clock. If Core 1 and Core 2 still feel like one blurred thing, the difference between them separates them properly.