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As I first starting planning to applying to B-school back in 2005 or 2006 I ended up starting a few different GMAT prep programs without completing them. When I started studying properly I was scoring around 600 on the diagnosis tests. I ended up scoring 740 with the help of various courses / books etc:

I started with the Princeton Review classes organized by ScorePlus in Dubai. The course is solid, the value is highly-dependent on the skill of the teachers, but regardless the coursework, textbooks and question banks are solid. The online coursework and questions are good too. Princeton is especially good at getting you up to the 700 level, but it’s better to turn elsewhere to make the jump up from there.

At some point I dabbled with the Veritas books briefly but really didn’t enjoy them. They are organized into lots of mini-books which sound good in theory (allowing you to do many short study-stints), but I found them cumbersome and unclear.

I randomly came across a Kaplan 800 GMAT book while in Delhi for a friend’s wedding and this was definitely one of the best resources I came across. No theory, just loads of GMAT questions of the tougher kind.

Very late in the day a friend turned me on to the ManhattanGMAT online courses, which ended up being my primary study-guide leading up to the exam (alongside the Kaplan 800 book). Excellent online resource and lots and lots of question banks and timed exercises etc. I would just caution about Manhattan’s math questions - my experience was that the level of difficulty was markedly higher than the level of questions in the actual GMAT which translated into a lot of time wasted studying for irrelevent q’s. The english q’s on the other hand were excellent. I scored 44/97%  verbal and 48/85% math (not particulalary good for an engineer!). So Manhattan was really good for verbal but probably was detrimental to my math score (I finished the GMAT math exam with about 20 mins to go because I kept rushing through the easier q’s anticipating the Manhattan type harder q’s that never appeared).

My advice is to focus on doing as many prep questions as you possibly can, timed where possible and to take the time to do a good number of timed prep tests too. Start with a PrincetonReview style course then move on to ManhattanGMAT for verbal and Kaplan800 for Math and Verbal.