Hey all,
As some may know, I passed my exam a couple of days ago, on 6th December. I've documented the whole process in a blog -
https://community.infosecinstitute.com/discussion/130887/cybercops-cissp-blog-passed/ - feel free to read through that to hear about my pain, suffering and confusion.
Short version of this stupidly long post:
- Use resources listed below
- Use Boson questions as a learning resource, not as a guide on how ready you may be or what your scores are - that I think is not a good guide
- Remember you're job in the exam is to report risk, lower threats, identify issues... it is not to fix anything or DO anything
- Book your exam now! Get it in the diary, have a date to work towards or else you'll just drift on for months and months or even years
- Don't just read the questions, analyse them. Leo Dregier says that this is an English test which is true to extent. Understand each word in the question, what exactly is it asking you.
- Analyse the answers too, go through each and compare them to the question asked
- Thanks to everyone - I truly appreciate your support
My Resources
Short answer:
- Sybex Cissp book - 9/10 - very good
- Conrad book (the bigger one) - 7/10 - good for a second resource
- Conrad 11th Hour - 7/10
- Sybex Question book - 6/10
- Boson Questions - 10/10
- Kelly Handerhan MP3s - 10/10 - I listened to these for months, and in some of them I was finishing off her sentences as I'd listened to them about 3 times over.
Longer answer:
As pictured... if anyone is new to this, then I would focus primarily on the
Sybex CISSP book - link
HERE - that is a fantastic book as it's not stupidly big, it's very readable and not boring. My only negative about the book is that the chapters are not domain specific. E.g. you will find Chapter 14 may cover Domains 4, 6 and 7. That's really annoying if you're just trying to focus on one weak Domain. Say you're really bad on Domain 4, you can't just open a chapter and read it.
After one read through of the Sybex book, I moved on to the
Conrad book (the light blue one in the picture). That is about 500 pages and a very good book. Quite light weight. It does not go deep at all so I wouldn't recommend ONLY using this book. I would recommend it as a secondary resource. It's particularly nice to start a new book rather than going over the same book twice in my view. You get a different tone, different explanations. For example, the Boson book does a FAR better job of explaining BCP and also Data Owner/Custodian.
I also used the 11th Hour book. That was also nice as it's 4-5 line explanations on all the topics basically. I read that on the last week, and I happily skipped a few pages here and there where I was comfortable with the topic area.
Finally,
the Practice tests book - that was OK. I wasn't the biggest fan of the Sybex questions. They are nothing at all similar to the exam, however that isn't really an issue. They're more for testing you've learnt the chapter contents properly. I wouldn't say that is essential.
Boson questions were brilliant. I made a thread here moaning that I was getting poor scores. My highest score was
67%. However, about a week before the exam I realised it doesn't matter what my scores are, the best approach for this is to just read question, answer it, click "Check answer" and then spend time reading what the answer was and why. Then move on. So it's not about scores, or about how well you do, it's a tool to learn from.
Book your exam NOW
Seriously, if you've decided you're studying, and you've bought your books, just stop for a second and book your exam. If you don't then months will drag on and you'll realise you've been studying on and off for a year and are still telling people "I'm going to do the exam soon".
I studied January->April. Then I stopped for about 5 months for personal reasons. Then studied October->December. When I started studying again in October I booked the exam that first week. Initially I booked it for 20th December but moved it forward, either way, I was able to count down each week and some of my blog it says things like "42 days to go", so I had a deadline, an endpoint, I spent £700 ($891) roughly on the exam so I had a really good incentive to work hard at it.
..... to be continued in next post due to post being too long
