Well, here's my two cents. I took step 2 last week. I don't have my scores back, but I felt much better than after step 1 and it went just dandy for me. I used Q-bank, Crush, and First Aid. Read First Aid twice and Crush once. If you were only going to use one...use first aid. It is much more in depth and has more topics. While Q-bank is not as good as it was for step 1 (eg...did not have nearly as many trauma questions or psych questions as q-bank seemed to emphasize), it was very good and certainly got me into the right frame of mind. It also pulled up a few topics that I would not have thought to be relevent or important (just like for step 1) that I looked at and actually showed up on the real deal. I can't speak for the other books that you mentioned.