I wrote a handful of blog posts about some of these topics while I was studying for the exam if you want to get a feel for what they test you on. You can also get the exam objects from their website (the form asks your for your email, but you don't have to give a real one).
Having to pay over $400 to take a test (actually, it's two separate tests) that I might fail was stressful to me, so I'm glad that I passed it! The exam expires after three years, so since I took it three years ago, I needed to renew it. There are several ways they allow you to renew your certification. I chose to enroll in their CertMaster CE training course, which renews your certification instantly upon completion. It's all done online and costs $129.
The way it works is you read through the content it gives you, which is organized based on the exam objectives of the exam you are renewing. At the end of each section, it gives you a 20-30 question multiple choice quiz. When you complete the quiz, it shows you which questions you got wrong, but doesn't tell you the right answer. You can "reset the assessment", which resets the quiz and lets you take it again.
You can give it a date for when you want to complete the training by, and it will recommend to you how much content ("knowledge points") you have to study each day in order to finish by that date. As you progress through each section, you earn knowledge points. It tells you how many knowledge points are in each section so you can get a feel for how long a section is.
It also has various "achievements" that you can earn to help motivate you. For example, there's one for getting 100% on a quiz and one for getting twenty consecutive questions correct. My left-brain found some of them to be a little patronizing (for example, resetting a quiz gives you an achievement), but it was nice to have that extra bit of encouragement.
I found the user interface of this web app to be very clean and intuitive. It is also very responsive, which leads me to believe that it's heavily JavaScript-based and doing a lot of caching in the background. For example, going back and forth between the pages in a lesson is instantaneous, as is flipping through the questions in a quiz.
I also loved the graphics they provided for showing what the different cable connectors look like (VGA, DisplayPort, USB, etc). They all have a consistent aesthetic to them, which made the learning process that much easier. I would post one here as an example, but I don't want to violate any copyrights.
In order to renew your certification, you have to get a 100% on each quiz. Once you do that, your certification is automatically renewed. You literally don't have to do anything else. I got an email no more than a day or two after I completed all the quizzes saying that my certification was renewed. My new expiration date was based upon my current expiration date, not the date I completed the CertMaster training. I appreciate that because I completed the training several months early!
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