Hey there TE,
Wanted to share my experience with this certification.
Experience: 10+ years as a sys admin, network engineer and developer. I like change and new challenges.
Reason for getting: HR requirement. Let's face it bite the bullet and get it if you want to work for company 'X' especially in the federal government/DOD space.
What resources did I use: Matt Walker's -
CEH Certified Ethical Hacker All-in-One Exam Guide, Third Edition - just get it and read it, follow his advice on approaching the exam and make note of his exam hints throughout the book. Set up a VM of Kali Linux and a VM of Windows XP to lab with.
How much study time: About 30 hours over a two week period.
My approach: The AIO guide has a test engine that I used initially to just get a baseline of where I was at. With this information, I hit my weak spots hard by reading and labbing on the VM OSes. After about a week and a half I took another practice exam and felt ready to take the exam.
The Exam: I took the exam at home through their ProctorU service. Overall good experience and would do again. Two hours later, including the 10 minutes with the proctor to ensure my setting for taking the exam was in compliance, I received my congratulations I passed page!
The exam itself was very straight forward, I did not see but maybe 1 or 2 issues with wording, grammar. Not a fan of the interface, felt very old school html, but still very functional. I just took my time, reviewed a few questions, eliminated the bad answers and chose the best answer for what EC Council was looking for not what my personal bias is.
As to specific tools in the exam, going over chapters 3-7 in the AIO will give you what you need. Just play with them in your lab to get you familiar with them.
TLDR - Use Matt Walker's AIO Exam guide and his practice test engine(about the same level of difficulty on the exam), work on weak spots, schedule and pass your test!
Please let me know if you have any other questions.
Thanks TE community for all your help, I hope this gives back a little
