Security+ Study Guide and DVD Training System

Rating:
Summary: I passed because of this book!
Review: I used this book as my primary study tool for Seurity+, and I just passed the test. The book was laid out in a very logical and easy to follow manner. All of the CompTIA objectives are listed with the table of contents of the book and then they have icons with the objective numbers throughout the books. This makes it really easy to make sure that you've covered all of the objectives. The book is really thorouhg and detailed, which I needed. The authors don't just give you terms with quick explanations or definitions. Every objective is covered in depth, and most of them have some type of exercsie that you can do or sereis of screen shots showing you some type of real world implemantation. At the end of each chapter, there are very helpful summaries, FAQs, and self test questions. The book also cames with a DVD, which is kind of a cool extra thing. It has one of the authors go through and talk about the objectives and important stuff that's on the test. Finally, there is an exam simulator on the web site that has a full practice exams. The questions on it were pretty tough, and the explantions for them were very helpful. All in all, I found this to be a very good product, and very useful for passing the test.

Rating:
Summary: Basic and wide overview for the exam.
Review: The security+ study guide is a book written as an aid to pass the CompTIA Security+ exam, an entry level exam. For people new in the security field, it offers a basic and wide overview of common security aspects and principles. For security professionals, the book is not suitable and a disappointment.

For 'new' people it might be useful - but be careful! The book contains lots of fluff and should be handled with caution as it contains faults.

Some notes: some chapters are too vague and a real laugh for this exam and offers no essential foundation for the "real world" or the exam (e.g. firewalls, cryptography, SSL, ...) while other chapters are packed with badly written technical explanations at a high rate (e.g. wireless chapter). Also, how are you able to understand important wireless issues when the crypto chapter is
positioned after the wireless chapter and doesn't offer almost any decent crypto basis at all?

Basic exercises are weak and might result in a wrong impression or understanding of security oriented actions and terms - that might result in a false sense of security.

The quality of the DVD lectures is very low and a waste of (your valuable study) time. It offers no or little additional value to the book.
Also note that the practice test is only available online through the website of Syngress.
Review by: Stijn Huyghe ([e-mail]).

Rating:
Summary: Authors are in fact S+ certified
Review: To the reviewer who said that the author(s) are not Security+ certified: I am one of the authors on this book and am in fact Security+ certified, as I believe all of us are. However, this did not make it into the book at the time the bios were printed.

Rating:
Summary: Best Security+ Study Guide
Review: I bought this book along w/ a couple of the others to study for the Security+ exam. I wanted to make sure I used the best book, so I read the first couple of chapters of each before deciding to use this one as my primary book. I continued to use Passport for quick, review stuff. This book was by far the most comprehensive and gave the most detailed and thorough explanation of the objectives. A lot of the other book throw terms at you with quick definitions, but never really give you any context or production examples. I also found this book mapped better to the official CompTIA objectives than any of the other books. The book has all of the objective numbers in the margins, so you always know which objecitves you're studying. This makes is a lot easier to make sure you've covered everything. The test questions were also very good, and the explanations of the quesitons and answers were very informative. The book help me pass. Well done.

Rating:
Summary: No updates on website. Author not security+ certified
Review: I find it hard to believe that a book that has been out for over 2 years doesn't have some type of update. After reading the first chapter and going through the self test questions I was disappointed. Figures were out of place in the appendix, and 2/20 questions were ambiguous at best. Also, I guess next time I get a cert book, I will make sure at least one of the authors or technical editors has that certification. Yeah, they have higher level certs but I believe anyone interested in writing a good/great cert book would at least have that certification themselves.

Rating:
Summary: Good exam coverage and decent real world coverage
Review: I would recommend this book along with the Exam Cram 2 book. The coverage of exam points was very detailed, and I remember several questions that seemed to be very close to word-for-word from the Syngess book (I am not suggesting foul play by any means). If you had to study from one source (I would not recommend doing so at all), this would be the book I would suggest.

If you also want some real-world coverage, this book does a good job with examples, etc.

Having said that, I found the DVD instructor-based training virually useless. I thought it would be great to have that extra, but the guy really does nothing but read the bold print, do a little explaining, and answer some obviously staged questions. Also, the practice exams from this book are not very good. I recommend the exams from Exam Cram 2.

Rating:
Summary: Don't rely on this book only
Review: I just passed my exam with a narrow escape of 788. This book did definitely play a major role in my preparation. But, I should also admit that I wouldn't have passed the exam if I relied on this book alone. Even though this book covers most of the details, there are a couple of drawbacks too. 1) It lacks a good number of practice questions. 2) There are some typos 3) At least in my opinion, it's not comprehensive. As some people were, you should be lucky enough not to get anything beyond the scope of this book if you want to pass the exam by relying only on this book. But my personal experience is that I did come across some details in the exam that were never covered in the book. The Boson practice tests came to my rescue. There are a total of 3 tests and you can get about 800 questions which are very very useful. Some of the questions I encountered in the exam were exactly the same as those in the practice tests with different wordings though.
My advice to future test takers is to read this book covering every little detail and buy some practice questions instead of trying different books. Especially test#2 and test#3 from Boson have some good questions. It is as much important to practice as many questions as you can as it is to read good comprehensive material.
Mike Meyers' Security+ Certification Passport is total waste of money. I found it to be utterly useless. If you are buying this Study guide, don't buy the passport.
I also tried the book from Microsoft press. It's even less comprehensive than the Study guide. Other than that no big complaints about the MS's book. But I liked the Study Guide much better especially the presentation of topics. The topics in the Microsoft's book were so jumbled up that I had to refer to the contents all time to see into which domain the topics fall.

Rating:
Summary: All of my favorite cert book pet peaves in one place!
Review: Well, you'd better know your acronyms. I don't mean for the test, I mean to use this book. There are many, many acronyms used in this book that are not defined, which I always find annoying. I kept the techweb online dictionary open while I used the book. I haven't taken the test yet so I can't address the accuracy of the content, but I can say that if you don't have at least a hi-level understanding of networking, you will be lost in space. I would strongly suggest working on Network + before this one. As someone who has a Network + certification and has taught Network +, I still found acronyms that I had to look up.

Now, the three major shortcomings, in my opinion. (Well two are pet peaves). First, there isn't a comprehensive set of test questions, at least in my opinion. It would have been nice to have a lot more practice questions. According to the book you can go to the Syngress site and get some sample questions and other goodies by using one of the serial numbers in the front of the book to access them; none of the serial numbers worked. I emailed to find out why they didn't work, and my email went unanswered.

Second, a pet peave, there is no glossary! This feature would not only have been helpful, but the creation of it would have let the authors know that they didn't define lots of acronmys and terms.

And last but not least, way too much "bla bla bla, see Chapter X to see what the heck we're talking about back here in Chapter 2". I found that annoying, and time-wasting, as are many of the exercises unless you have a system administrator who doesn't mind your sniffing around the network. Most system administrators will not allow that for many reasons not the least of which is that if you find a security hole, he or she will look like a dufus.

Rating:
Summary: Main resource to pass exam
Review: I took Security+ today and used this book as my main resource to pass the exam. I finished with a score of 788 out of 900 which was just over the 764 needed to pass.

This exam covers material in other certifications, especially the Microsoft Windows 2000 Network Infrastructure MCP which also tests knowledge of PKI and certificates.

I think that some of the exam questions are a bit ambiguous and blame my missed questions on that more than on any problems of factual material in the book.

I gave 4 stars instead of 5 since 1) the DVD lectures are very superficial and mostly a waste of time, and 2) there is no practice test included with the book. A practice test is available online but it wasn't too good so I would recommend supplementing the book with either Boson or Transcender tests.

Rating:
Summary: Good book but contains errors
Review: This is a pretty decent book but contains some technical errors so be carefull!!