CISSP Video Mentor (LiveLessons) [ペーパーバック]

There are a lot of ways to study for a test. Of course there are numerous books on preparing for the exam, and you will probably want to study at least one of these and then keep it on hand as a reference when you need to go into the system and actually make something work.

This video (on DVD) is yet another approach. It has some five hours of video presentation covering the basic principles of cryptography, authentication codes, IPSec, 802.11 wireless security and more. The advantage of having a video presentation is that the material comes to you with less work on your part. In a short period of time you get a complete overview of the material that will be covered on the test. Since it's on a DVD you can watch it over and over, learning more with each repetition.

I find that getting this quick overview and then going to the book enables me to have a better background so that when I get to the book I know more about what I am reading.

When I had the opportunity to try a new Shon Harris product, I felt pretty excited! Ms. Harris does excellent work and truly knows how to cover the security topics needed for such exams as the CISSP. The Video Mentor is an interesting concept in that it only covers several topics of what Harris considers the critical CISSP exam areas, and does so more in depth than some of the other study guides that I have used in the past. The areas are: cryptography (foundations and hashing), IPSec, the OSI Model, and 802.11 wireless.

I think this concept works really well! I enjoyed the discussion on crypto-analysis. This isn't the typical discussion that you see on cryptography, which I appreciated because it makes it a bit more practical and applicable to real life (so often this discussion is very clinical and not easy to apply to real life). Harris does this by using graphics and plenty of examples to help drive her points home. The slide titled "working together" is a great example of how all the components come together in a crypto-system.

Another new thing in this DVD are the labs, which are very cool! They walk you through how the concepts apply and how they work, using visuals and tools that you might use yourself to help learn the concepts. When I got to the OSI model lab, I was a little concerned at the start because the moderator referred to and used a simple text file for illustration, but moved swiftly on to illustrate the concepts with tools. This turned out to be one of the better labs on the DVD!

A couple of quirks: the DVD is set for 1280X960 resolution, which my fairly new laptop didn't have. It worked just fine, but it was odd. Also: with any type of online class, it is convenient to have controls to stop and start a video at your leisure; however, the default player doesn't have these controls, which kind of forced you to sit through the whole thing at once.

With the DVD is a companion book has slide outlines, as well as space to add your own notes. Overall, the Video Mentor is a great tool to really help those who need to dive deeper into some important topics for the CISSP exam.

I purchased this to hopefully get a feel for what the larger $500.00 course would be like. I found Shon Harris easy to listen to. She has a natural way of speaking and repeats things enough to get the point across. The speaker during the lab exercises (Michael I believe) is also a good speaker making it easy to follow the live demonstrations. One of the other narrators is not so great and sounds like a sales guy making some elevator pitch or something. He puts emphasis on parts of sentences that makes it sound like he doesn't know what he is talking about and is simply reading a script. That's no slam on his ability to speak the English language. I just found him harder to listen to for any length of time. Overall, the presentation of the topics and demonstrations were good. This is pretty dry technical stuff and the lessons were very clear and included enough examples to make you understand the material. I will likely buy the full CISSP course now that I have seen this.