five study resources that i use  to prepare for the cissp exam

if you're new here welcome on this channel i  talk about building a successful career for  

yourself and cyber security and information  technology if you're looking to pass the  

ciasp exam make sure to hit the like button  down below so that way i know that you like  

this video you found it valuable and so that the  youtube algorithm pushes it out to other people  

that are also looking to pass the issp exam  as well so as you might imagine the ciasp exam  

requires a bit of strategy when preparing to  test and take and ideally pass the exam right  

and the reason why is because there's so many  different types of topics that they do cover  

in the exam i mean they cover network  communications software developments governance  

risk and compliance cyber security fundamentals  like security operations and some of the more  

high-level principles that we learn early on in  our cyber security careers so with all of these  

different types of topics and there's a lot more  there's actually like eight domains and they're  

gonna be testing on the technology and then how  you protect the technologies so with all of these  

different topics that we're gonna be tested on  when we're preparing for the exam how do you go  

about preparing for them i mean can i really just  leverage this one handbook and say that's enough  

for me to pass the cisp exam you know honestly  not necessarily when i was preparing for my exam  

i did leverage the official cisp study guide which  i have it right here i have actually three of them  

this is the one that i use which is quite large  this right here is the new one which as you can  

see is smaller now with the cissp exam being so  difficult and so vast how can we just depend on  

one book to prepare for it well as you can see  here i have three books three cisp study guides  

two and which are the ones that i use this other  one here is the ninth edition that's the newest  

one the two that i have here those were the ones  that i used to prepare for the exam now official  

study guides yes they are very very important  they are going to lay the groundwork and give  

you a very good idea of the different types  of questions and how they're going to ask the  

questions i should say the topics and how they're  going to ask the questions about the topics that's  

what's going to be in these books now what you're  not going to learn is how the technology works  

to great depth they will touch on it things like  kerberos they will explain kerberos in detail but  

i gotta be honest with you when i was preparing  to to take my exam and i was learning kerberos  

um i didn't understand it and and even to this  day to be honest with you i still don't quite  

perfectly understand that kerberos is very  advanced but you know i knew it enough because i  

had gone to other resources to help me understand  it and in this video we're going to be talking  

quite a bit about those other resources but i  would say that the first resource that i use was  

the official study guide and i did double down and  buy the all-in-one uh official study guide as well  

which this was originally written by sean harris  and then fernando mamie sorry if i mispronounced  

that last name but uh he uh kind of added to  it appended to it and made some adjustments but  

the official study guide eighth edition by mike  chappelle was the one that i kind of used that  

was kind of like my bible for six weeks i read  it any waking moment that i had where i wasn't  

you know working and i wasn't around family or  i didn't have any family obligations to tend to  

so i would get away you know i would i would  wake up early study stay up late study on the  

weekends run off to a coffee shop study if i was  at work waiting on something studying at my desk  

i read through this one one time front to back  and then i leveraged the cissp all-in-one uh study  

guide here as kind of a supplementary resource to  highlight anything that i didn't quite grasp from  

the official study guide right here and i  did that for a lot of various topics because  

with the eight domains that you're going to be  tested on when you're preparing for the ciasp exam  

there's not really any way for one person i mean  i'm willing to bet money on this to be honest that  

not one person or the majority of the people that  are taking the cisp exam have extended experience  

and all of the eight domains that you're going  to be tested on so when you're preparing for it  

there's likely going to be some knowledge gaps  that you're going to have and you're going  

you're going to want to educate yourself on those  areas because you might be stronger in some areas  

not that you know everything and you don't have  to but in the other domains you will want to make  

sure you brush up on those topics so that being  said these are great guides to get you through  

but you are going to need some other resources as  well so in addition to the two study guides that i  

have here and the latest ninth edition which is a  little bit smaller um i had to leverage some other  

resources as well not that i actually depended  on the ninth edition that just came out last week  

and i just wanted to show you how skinny it is i  didn't use that a year ago when i was preparing  

for my cisp exam i just used these two books right  here but for the for the practice exams and and  

for you know just overall preparation and trying  to understand and digest some of the concepts that  

i didn't understand in the study guides i had to  leverage some other resources and i'm gonna hop  

over and share my screen so let's go ahead and  do that so the next thing that i leveraged were  

some udemy courses that i had found online and  that's just because udemy courses are notorious  

for being cheap and affordable and if you work  at a company that has like a business agreement  

with them which i highly recommend if you do not  know make sure to find that out you can actually  

get a lot of udemy courses for free because some  of the instructors they you know more for the more  

popular courses they have built a partnership  and agreement with udemy to share their courses  

out there and more of a subscription model with  the business partners that partner with them so  

at the time i was working with deloitte and they  had that type of agreement so i could just log on  

to udemy using my deloitte credentials and i was  able to access the courses here and as you can  

see here thor has a lot of great certification uh  courses he teaches the pmp he has a lot of cissp  

content and and some of the cism content as well  and that's really what i leveraged now i didn't  

use all of thor's courses and that's not to say  that he's not a great instructor i thought his  

information was highly valuable in the  areas that i didn't know about which  

i'm not a huge network guy i had some networking  experience uh in the past when i was working at  

a managed services provider but i'm just not the  you know route switch type guy i don't have a ccna  

or anything like that so i needed to understand  a little bit more information a little bit more  

to a little bit more detail on the cyber security  concepts that we're going to be tested on  

in my cissp exam so i went to thor's content  and i was able to find some very valuable um  

lectures and just overall content and explanations  that were they were touching on some of the  

components to the cissp material that i didn't  understand when it came to network security  

so i highly recommend that you leverage courses  especially thor's i thought thor's was very  

helpful and the next study course that i used  was uh kelly handerhand's cissp uh course on  

cyber now the course was good it didn't have very  um it didn't have a lot of in-depth information um  

not to say anything negative about the course i  thought the course was very helpful and i think  

that it's kind of like on the same level as the  exam right it covers a lot of the baseline topics  

and it it'll give you a pretty good idea of  what to expect when you're taking your exam  

but like when it comes to the actual detail  um that i was having trouble understanding  

and to be quite frank i was having trouble  answering when i was taking a practice exam  

i didn't quite get what i was looking for from  this with everything and again there's not there's  

nothing negative to say that's just a difficult  thing to cover when it comes to the cispa for any  

instructor that's going to be teaching the cisp  it's it's just hard for you to go into great depth  

with every single knowledge item that's going  to be tested on when you're taking the exam like  

that's just that's just that's just natural  because we're not all experts in every single  

topic which is the reason why i'd be willing  to bet money that's going into this you're  

not going to know everything that's just point  blank so anyways going back i found this course  

to be helpful it did help me understand some  more content or some of the more fundamental  

topics especially when it came to like i think  it was grc is one of the reasons that i came here  

and maybe some asset management stuff which i  already knew a lot i think that i scored almost  

perfect in my asset security uh domain because it  tells you you know kind of where you were um uh or  

not percentage-wise but it kind of gave you like  a a pretty good understanding of how well you did  

based on each domain and i think when it came to  asset security and software development security  

i did really well but uh oh yeah security  engineering and architecture but when it  

came to some of the others that was a little bit  weaker for me especially when it came to like the  

let's see here uh these are the exact domains um  but i think when it came to security assessments  

and testing i didn't quite know a lot about that  so anyways i used other resources for these um  

domains and kelly handerhand was one of them  now when it came to practice exams i don't  

have a better recommendation than boston's x-m  max for cissp 2020. now the exam was re-built or  

republished this year it was just republished back  in what june or may i think it was may 15th um  

so i don't know that this is going to be  totally relevant i think it still will  

because the changes that they made on the  new cissp exam were just marginal it was  

just like a one percent uptick in the software  security section and i think they reduced the  

network security down by one percent as well this  regardless of what we know the changes of the exam  

i found that the cissp practice exam was extremely  helpful the questions are so so similar to what  

you're going to see on the actual exam itself um  except for the fact that the actual exam uses the  

computerized adaptive testing method and this  is not like that this is going to be just a  

typical linear exam process if you want to  learn more about the cat method and my my  

my experience testing on this for the cssp  i'll put a video up here and the card so  

check for that link you can also find a  link down in the in the description below  

where i'll be talking more about that but anyways  going back to practice exams i don't have a better  

recommendation than boston so check them out  if you're looking for more questions sometimes  

people want to just continue pushing questions and  over and over and over you know i found that um  

thor's questions were very good as well he  does have them so here's i think this is a  

video 89 lectures 32 lectures let's see here  hearts the issp practice questions so we have  

we have uh yeah the 34 minutes i'm not quite  sure how that works oh here we go 125 questions  

um and it covers all the cisp domains so that's  good you can you can leverage these other  

resources like you know uh practice exams on udemy  and other platforms as well to kind of help you  

get more questions in your face in your minds  thinking more and more about the cisv concepts uh  

and and helping you prepare now the last  thing that i'm going to have to reference  

as a good ciasp study resource is google and i  hate to be redundant here but honestly if there's  

anything you don't know when you're preparing  for the exam whether that be you're reading  

a topic and the official study guide or you're  in a practice exam if you're in a practice exam  

jot it down on an empty piece of paper whatever  it is if you're if you're not sure what kuberos  

is or something like that write it down okay  then go to google after your exam and learn  

about it you know if i'm going to learn about  kerberos kerberos let's see if i can spell that  

right okay so here's kerberos it's a protocol and  it's for network authentication i'm gonna go ahead  

and learn about it so here kerberos was designed  by mit so here's a great place to get started  

and i can learn all about it there i can go to  wikipedia i can go to varonis and learn more about  

kerberos here that's all i'm trying to say if you  don't understand a concept maybe you're a master  

at kerberos i'm not but maybe you are go to google  and learn about the topic don't be lazy get on the  

internet and go and figure out whatever it is you  don't understand you have so many resources to you  

to your disposal so if you don't find it  in a course you don't understand it quite  

in the depth of you know that you need  it to be within the official study guides  

go online and go and find those resources out  there somebody has talked about it somebody has  

written about it you just need to go and find  it and learn it there's a couple youtube videos  

which is obviously i mean you found me here so  youtube's another great resource get on there  

and learn it you have no excuses get out  there and learn it that's what i had to do so  

you keep this process up over and over and over  you will end up passing your cisp exam all right  

so that about wraps up this video i hope you found  this helpful um this is it like these are the five  

resources that i use to study for the ciasp and  pass it on the first attempt and i guarantee you  

that if you follow all the steps that i mentioned  in this video and in the video that i'm going to  

link right here if you've clicked that link  right there and you watch that other video  

on on my study process for preparing for the ciasp  i'll also put a link down in the description below