52 guides, 44 of them carrying a named source list. Here is the method behind them, stated so you can hold us to it.
Castmark Press does. There is no individual byline on any guide, and that is deliberate: the guides come out of the same research as the books, and the publisher stands behind every page rather than distributing responsibility across names.
The practical consequence is that a mistake is ours, not an author’s, and the correction route below is the same one for every page on this site.
Where a guide makes a regulatory or procedural claim, it carries a numbered Sources list naming the document, its date, and where to read it — the regulation, the agency page, the exam objectives. Secondary sources are not used as authority. If a fact cannot be traced to the body that issued it, it does not go in.
That list is not decoration. It is the difference between a publisher and a content farm, and it is your route to check us without taking our word for anything.
Rules move. A claim without a date rots quietly and reads as current forever, so our guides date what they state: not “the exam has no announced release date” but “as of August 2026, CompTIA has published no release date”.
A dated negative is checkable. An undated one is a guess with a confident voice.
We do not print figures the issuing body has not published, even when every other source does. The draft objectives for CompTIA’s next Security+ exam mark the question count and the duration as to be determined, so our guide says exactly that — while material elsewhere quietly copies the numbers from the current exam and hopes they carry over.
Nor do we invent per-topic percentages where an exam board publishes weights only at the domain level. “We will not invent a number” is a real editorial position here, and it costs us the tidier answer more often than it looks.
Occasionally an agency’s own publications contradict each other. Our Illinois skills test guide is the clearest case: the state’s current driver manual, its live FAQ and its administrative rule describe three different sets of test exercises, and none has been withdrawn.
We could pick the newest and present it confidently. We do not, because a candidate who prepares for the wrong set pays for our tidiness with a test fee and a retest wait. Where the source of truth is genuinely unresolved, the guide says which sources disagree and tells you who to ask.
Every guide ends in the same place: the current published instructions of the body that runs the exam or issues the credential override anything we have written. Study guides are for the material. Applications, fees, scheduling and eligibility are the agency’s, and they change faster than any book.
Corrections are logged publicly, with dates, on the updates page. Nothing is quietly edited away, and a guide that has been revised says when. If you have found an error — in a guide or in a book — tell us.
Castmark Press is an independent publisher. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by PMI, CompTIA, any state licensing agency, the FMCSA, the Florida Department of Education, or any other certifying body or government agency. Practice questions in our books are original study questions, not official examination questions.
