# FirstTry

> Original practice questions for 92 IT certifications, written from each vendor's published exam objectives. Every answer names the official page it was checked against, and the month that page was last read.

FirstTry is an independent study product. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by any certification body. Certification names and exam codes belong to their owners and are used to say which exam a page is about.

What the catalog holds today, derived at build time: 11,496 verified questions citing 2,995 distinct official pages, across 79 certifications.

## Facts worth citing

These pages carry facts that are hard to find elsewhere, each one linked to the vendor page it was read from.

- [Certification dataset](https://firsttry.app/data): every exam's price, format, passing score, published domain weightings and lifecycle, described and licensed CC BY 4.0 (attribution the only condition), with the machine-readable file at [certifications.json](https://firsttry.app/certifications.json).
- [Exam retirements](https://firsttry.app/retirements): which certifications have a vendor-announced end date, soonest first. 12 of the 92 here are retiring or retired. Vendors publish this inconsistently and often bury it; this is the list, with a source on every row.
- [Blueprint changes](https://firsttry.app/exam-changes): what actually moved when a vendor revised an exam, including domain weightings before and after.
- [Who pays for the exam](https://firsttry.app/funding): GI Bill reimbursement rules, DoD 8140 approvals and academic pricing, with the page that states each rule.
- [How questions are written and verified](https://firsttry.app/how-we-write-questions): the process and the live counts behind it, including how recently the checks ran and what share carries a dated verification record rather than only a citation.
- [Why we do not sell dumps](https://firsttry.app/why-not-dumps): the position on harvested exam content.

## Free tools

Both derive every figure from the registry above, both are free, and neither asks for an account or an email address. Everything they compute is public data the vendors publish; the work is in the arithmetic, not in owning anything.

- [Cost calculator](https://firsttry.app/tools/cost-calculator): the real total for a set of certifications. Voucher, retake, the extras the vendor prices, and how each vendor states renewal. No pass-rate estimate anywhere in it, because no vendor publishes one.
- [Study planner](https://firsttry.app/tools/study-planner): an exam date turned into a schedule, with the domains apportioned by the vendor's published weightings rather than split evenly, and the last stretch reserved for sitting practice exams.

## Study material

- [Roadmaps by job role](https://firsttry.app/roles): which certifications to take for a given job, in order, and what each role does not need.
- [All certifications](https://firsttry.app/catalog)
- [Cheat sheets](https://firsttry.app/cheatsheets): reference tables per subject, free, no account.
- [Guides and costs](https://firsttry.app/articles): what each exam costs in full, including retake and renewal, and who it is for.
- [A question a day](https://firsttry.app/daily): one verified question, free, with its explanation and source.
- [Pricing](https://firsttry.app/pricing)

## How to cite this

Attribution is the licence for the dataset and it is what makes reuse welcome:
"Certification data from https://firsttry.app". Prices and retirement dates change when
vendors change them; the JSON carries a `generatedAt` date, and quoting it
alongside a figure is the difference between a fact and a number.

## Not for crawling

/practice and /dashboard are disallowed in robots.txt for every agent. The
practice surfaces serialize question banks, and those are the product.