Hey guys,
I just wanted to post my experience to help anyone who is confused/lost/frusrated as much as I was.
Materials:
CompTIA CySA+ Study Guide - Mike Chapple/David Seidl
CompTIA CySA+ Practice Tests - Mike Chapple/David Seidl
CompTIA CySA+ Complete Course and Practice Test - Jason Dion
CompTIA CySA+ 5 Practice Certification Exams - Jasion Dion
CySA+ Flash Cards V2.0 - Found on the CompTIA subreddit
Acronym List -
Quizlet
Certmaster - Never ended up using this
I started this whole thing in February, so it took just a few months to complete. I started off first by reading the CySA+ study guide, it covered a large amount of the objectives from the exam objectives sheet. After that was finished, I took the Exam Objective sheet and watched the Jason Dion videos and filled out each objective. It didn't cover everything, even with referencing the book to fill in the gaps, they still didn't cover every objective, but it was pretty close. After those were done I moved over to the 5 Jason Dion exams, printed out the flash cards from reddit and worked on those until I got 90%+ on the exams. I then used the practice test book from Mike Chapple and only studied the tests with any type of diagram, picture or code.
I have to say..... this was more difficult than I expected. I took every minute of the two and a half hours they gave, it was difficult, but felt it was fair at the same time. The extra time added lets you go through every question and allows you to read it multiple times. At the end of the test I had around 10 questions flagged and 2 questions where I had no idea what they were asking.
Lots of people say not to purchase the extra Jason Dion tests, but honestly they had extra log questions that were worth the couple of bucks it costed. The extra logs give you more scenarios for troubleshooting and help you in the real exam. Totally worth it IMO, it's hard to interpret a SQL log or XSS log if you've never seen one before and this totally helps you overcome that.
The practice test from Mike Chapple and the reddit flashcards were a total overkill, but help prepare you for troubleshooting and memorization, they were helpful but should have spent less time on these.
Thanks for all the help and hopefully this can help someone out.
