Hi all,
Today, I successfully passed the CISSP exam. I began studying for the exam in June 2012 and actively prepared "almost" every day for about 1-2 hours a night of study. While preparing I read many success stories on TechExams and how mentally exhausting the exam is. My thoughts of the exam are that it is quite difficult ... much more difficult then any of the practice exams I ever took while preparing. For example, the questions dealing with the ALE, SLE stuff on the real exam were much more in depth then ANY practice exam. Likewise, the Cryptography questions were more difficult than I anticipated. Most of the time on the more difficult questions I found myself able to eliminate two wrong answers rather quickly and then the other two would seem like the same answer.
The exam itself took me about 4 1/2 hours to get through all 250 questions and another 30 minutes for review (I marked about 30 questions). I took 3 breaks in between. When I finished I felt 50/50 that I had passed the exam, and was very much relieved when I got the "congratulations" from the test center official.
My study materials to prepare were as follows:
CISSP for Dummies -- Pretty decent book, the CD comes with some practice tests which were good to take 2 weeks before the exam.
CISSP Study Guide 2nd Edition, Eric Conrad -- Great Book! Read it 3 times.
CCCure study guides/resources -- Good resources, thank you Clement!
CCCure Quiz Paid engine -- Good, but some of the questions are a bit dated (e.g. Security Architecture). Well worth $39.95 however.
Boson Exam full version -- Good test engine
PrepLogic Demo -- Good for being free, the demo version has one 250 question test
I also purchased the Shon Harris AIO book, but read 2 paragraphs and closed it and didn't really open it up ever unless I was bored. It just didn't catch me like the other two books I read did.
I wanted to also thank the members here at TechExams. I don't post much, but I do read most of the posts day-to-day. JDMurray, thanks for moderating a great site! I'm not sure what I plan to do next, I would love to try an ISACA cert, but I don't meet the requirements yet (getting close).
Well ... now to fill in the endorsement stuff
