For books I use the Amazon ranking engine to help me to decide which is the "best" on the subject if I have decided to study something in real depth....
Certification is a funny thing. Although the MS exams actually require quite a lot of work to pass, let's not forget that certification is essentially a vendor revenue stream. But...
I'm glad someone mentioned "remove sensitive data". I know many places simply test against copies of live but we should be resisting it and pushing for proper development data sets.