hey there my name is nick and today we're gonna be talking about the top
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
so you can't miss it you will pass the ciasp exam it's more about understanding the mindset
you're going to be tested as a manager so this is a management and cyber security certification so
they're going to ask you questions things like what is the best thing to do for the people
for the organization you know all of the answers could be right and usually they are
right but your job is to determine which one is the best option for you to choose and that
that's what makes the cisp hard is understanding which one is the best because you have to not only
understand what the question's asking you you have to understand what every single answer actually is
in greater depth so that you can understand how to answer the question the right way
if that makes sense so understanding all of these concepts just enough to pass the exam
is the goal and there's a lot of concepts that you're going to be tested on so
if you don't understand something don't just breeze past it and and just say to yourself i
don't need to learn this because i'm going to do well in these other domains that i do know
don't do that you're going to sell yourself short and you may fail the exam if you do that there are
a lot of concepts in here that i do know for the cisp there's also a lot more that i don't know
and for those that i don't know i had to use these resources online i had to go on google
and youtube and make sure that i digested it a lot i mean really really understood it and if i
couldn't figure it out then i would go and talk to somebody that knew it better than i did and
learn it that way so if you if you need to find people you can reach out to me drop a comment
down in the section below reach out to people on linkedin that are experts in this area say hey
i'm studying for the cisp exam there's this question on i don't know ide security or
ids you know intrusion detection systems and you don't deal with intrusion detection systems
so what do you need to know there okay so if you if you need to know that go reach out to somebody
that deals with network security on linkedin and say hey i'm studying for the cisp i have
this question here and i was wondering if i could borrow like just five ten minutes of your time and
ask you a little bit about this chances are you may end up finding somebody that's willing to help
you i know i did and you'll get the information you need so you can go and move on with your
life and go move on to the next topic you may not understand or test for the cisp exam that
being said this concludes this video i hope you found this helpful i will see you in the next one