Security + Resources
I talked about what I like to do for studying in my CCNA post, but I’ll quickly summarize what I said in that post. I like to have a book, a video series, some practice exams/questions, and depending on the cert, some interactive labs. The good news on this certification is that after looking it over I’ve been exposed to a lot of these security concepts already either through classes or my own studying. Here’s the link to the concepts covered on the exam, and taking a look at the percentage of the topics it appears the bulk of it is recognizing threats, architecting and designing a secure network, and implementing security concepts.
The book I chose was Darril Gibson’s CompTIA Security+ Book. It’s relatively new (less than a year old at the time of writing this), has good reviews, and offers a 10% voucher off the cost of the exam, neat. I chose Professor Messer’s free Security + Video Series on YouTube for my lecture series. When I was studying for my A+ exams, I used his study guides, videos and practice exams and I thought his materials were the most useful for that exam. He also does monthly live study sessions on stream that I found helpful. Finally, for practice exams I got Jason Dions practice exams on Udemy. To be honest I was leaning toward Professor Messer, but after some research I saw a lot of people talking about how great these practice exams and there’s 6 of them, so that’ll be great in the weeks leading up to the exam. As for labbing it up, I feel semi confident in my ability to spin up a windows server VM or something along those lines to help me understand things. If I need to I can always go digging for that.
My study schedule is pretty intense, but I feel confident in my ability to tackle it. I have myself studying every weekday but Wednesday because I work at my part time job then although I could plan on using it as a catching up day if I need to. I’m aiming for a section of videos (i.e 1.1 Principles of Social Engineering) a day as well as a chapter of my book a day (~25-30 pages). I plan on taking notes during the lectures and then typing them up to get another exposure to the material. Oddly enough the first few sections are the longest as far as the lectures go. If all goes well I should be able to finish the book and the videos by then end of February. I haven’t set a hard date yet, but I’m thinking Mid-March at the earliest and late early May for the latest. I plan on taking a practice exam this week and seeing how I do to gauge the date I want.