The New York State laws area of the Police Captain exam
One of the five areas samples the Penal Law, the Criminal Procedure Law, the Vehicle and Traffic Law and the Family Court Act. All four are published free by the State, and that single fact is what makes this examination preparable at all.
An examination scored on public law can be prepared from public law
The Department names the bodies of law this area samples and points at nothing else. Every one of them is published in full by the State and can be read by anybody, without a subscription and without a purchase.
Compare that with a promotional examination scored against a named copyrighted textbook, where preparation is impossible without the book and everything written about it is downstream of somebody else's property. This paper has no such dependency, which is why original preparation for it is honest work rather than a paraphrase.
No reading list, and nothing to buy
The guide names no textbook, no publisher, no edition and no reading list for this area or any other. If your announcement names one, that is your agency adding something the guide does not describe, and your announcement is the document that governs.
Where a question here is written from a section of law, the section is printed on the question. You are meant to check us against the statute rather than take our word for it, and every one of those citations has been checked, phrase by phrase, against the State Senate's published text of the section named.
Which year's law applies is an announcement question
Announcements in this family state the date on which the law tested is taken to be in effect, and agencies scheduling independently do not all state the same one. Nothing here asserts a single year as applying everywhere, because no single year does.
Read the line in your own announcement. It is a short sentence and it decides whether a recent amendment is on your paper.