SANS course

rob1234

Hello,

Thinking of doing a SANS course but had a question to ask.

Do they give you ebooks or only hard copies of the books? I would prefer ebooks.

Thanks,

paul78

As I recall, eBooks are not available. What you get is a hard-copy of the slides used and mpg recordings.

rob1234

Thanks, that's a bit rubbish pay all that money and you can not even choose the training material!

JDMurray

The GIAC exams are open book; you are only allowed to take paper into the exam and nothing electronic. Given this, you would be forced to print out all of the SANS material for your GIAC exam if it were in eBook format. People would complain about that too, so SANS spends the extra money to provide their materials on paper.

ChooseLife

JDMurray wrote: »

The GIAC exams are open book; you are only allowed to take paper into the exam and nothing electronic. Given this, you would be forced to print out all of the SANS material for your GIAC exam if it were in eBook format. People would complain about that too, so SANS spends the extra money to provide their materials on paper.

There is no reason why they could not provide both paper and electronic versions, considering the price people pay.

JDMurray

Electronic media is too easy to pirate and redistribute; I don't blame them.

cyberguypr

JD beat me to the piracy point. Makes perfect sense.

docrice

This was a lengthy email thread on the SANS Advisory Board mailing list a while back. Lots of folks had opinions on this.

JDMurray

I just got on that mailing list. I haven't had time to sift through the archives of it yet. Happen to know the year and month of that thread?

docrice

It started on 6/30.

JDMurray

Well, I looked through a lot of the posts on that GIAC mailing list thread about wanting PDF releases of SANS manuals. There certainly seem to be a lot of people who want electronic distribution of SANS materials despite the obvious risk to SANS' own intellectual property. A few people cite how SANS distributes the class lectures in unprotected MP3 format, so why not do the same for the SANS class books using PDF? Probably because the information in the books is needed much more to pass the corresponding GIAC exam than the information in the lectures. (Both are needed, IMHO.)

A lot of people who have scored 90%+ on one or more very difficult GIAC exams would rather SANS take its chances with having its IP widely pirated--thus devaluing their hard-earned GIAC cert(s)--so they can have easy-to-search-and-carry reference materials. I see this attitude as more of a lack of business sense than of security-mindedness.

rob1234

I know abou thte privacy concern but it is a shame we have to lose out because of it there is steps they can do to make it diffcult to priate the material but I understand why they don't.

paul78

As a private for-profit company, I probably also expect that SANS is careful about their bottom line. Even the printed materials are just simple photo-copies which are spiral bound.

JDMurray

If anyone really needs their SANS materials in PDF format they can scan and OCR their books them self. The software to do it is very inexpensive.

SephStorm

JDMurray wrote: »

Well, I looked through a lot of the posts on that GIAC mailing list thread about wanting PDF releases of SANS manuals. There certainly seem to be a lot of people who want electronic distribution of SANS materials despite the obvious risk to SANS' own intellectual property. A few people cite how SANS distributes the class lectures in unprotected MP3 format, so why not do the same for the SANS class books using PDF? Probably because the information in the books is needed much more to pass the corresponding GIAC exam than the information in the lectures. (Both are needed, IMHO.)

A lot of people who have scored 90%+ on one or more very difficult GIAC exams would rather SANS take its chances with having its IP widely pirated--thus devaluing their hard-earned GIAC cert(s)--so they can have easy-to-search-and-carry reference materials. I see this attitude as more of a lack of business sense than of security-mindedness.

The pirating would not IMO devalue the certs, perhaps the fact that more people would pass would, but again, just semantics.

JDMurray

I'm assuming the purpose of the pirating would be to create cheating materials to help people successfully challenge the GIAC exams. It would also allow SANS' competition to augment their own training materials by incorporating SANS' own information. However, either of these objectives can be accomplished by repeatedly enrolling agents in SANS training courses and legitimately obtaining the materials and taking the exams. There are persistent stories of how a (now famous) CISSP training materials author did this to the (ISC)2 and wrote a few best-selling books from it.

MJohnsonres

JDMurray wrote: »

I'm assuming the purpose of the pirating would be to create cheating materials to help people successfully challenge the GIAC exams. It would also allow SANS' competition to augment their own training materials by incorporating SANS' own information. However, either of these objectives can be accomplished by repeatedly enrolling agents in SANS training courses and legitimately obtaining the materials and taking the exams. There are persistent stories of how a (now famous) CISSP training materials author did this to the (ISC)2 and wrote a few best-selling books from it.

I agree with you... Protect The Bottom Line At All Cost.

rob1234

JDMurray wrote: »

If anyone really needs their SANS materials in PDF format they can scan and OCR their books them self. The software to do it is very inexpensive.

I was thinking of doing that it is jut hassle and when you are paying so much money you do not really want the extra hassle and if on eof the main reasons they do not do pdfs is to stop pirating doing what you suggeted is an easy way to pirate the material so they should just do it in the first place!