Customer Reviews

The GSEC Prep Guide: Mastering SANS GIAC Security Essentials

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

The Wiley book is well laid out and the writing is crisp and clear. Mike has a gift to explain a topic well in the minimum number of words and I hope he continues to write on information technology topics and I look forward to his future books.

I had to give the book a low score, two stars, because it fails to meet its purpose. It purports to be a preparation guide for the GIAC GSEC exam series. I wanted to evaluate the book to be sure the content can prepare students for the exam and in my opinion, it is not adequate for that task.

Since the book is useful at an outline level for reviewing the material, I will focus this review on the areas where I believe it falls drastically short in preparing you for the exams. MS Windows Security accounts for 1/7 of the GSEC exam. Sadly, the coverage in the book is apparently based on a very old version of the course. The best advice I can give you is read the course description for day 5 on the web and buy a good, up to date Windows 2000/XP book or two.

There is no coverage in the Prep Guide of the cookbook (hands on) material which is testable as of July 2003 students and beyond. There are hands on questions for every tool that is covered by the cookbook in the exam bank.

The wireless section, appendix B, is testable. I did not see coverage of wireless in the book.

The author speaks authoritatively from time to time about the nature or content of the exam. It is may be dangerous to do this. The exam is dynamically generated. Questions are pulled from subject buckets from an enormous bank of questions. No two exams are ever alike.

Finally, it is important to remember that the GSEC day books are over 2,000 pages and the Hands On cookbook is several hundred pages as well. It is impossible to fully cover that much material in 480 pages, even with a gifted author.

Stephen Northcutt - Director GIAC

I spent a few hours looking through this book at a local bookstore only to come away quite disappointed.
The information contained in this book won't come close to replacing the SANS GIAC course material, nor is it a text I would recommend as a supplement to anyone's study efforts.
The information contained in the book is not only in the GIAC course, but can also be obtained freely on the internet with little effort.
The GIAC certifications focus heavily on hands-on exposure and experience and this is reflected in the testing. This book doesn't take the student to the level of understanding needed to attempt the exams for the GSEC certification.
One must also consider the fact that the GSEC certification is not a stagnant course, the course is always being reviewed and updated to keep it relevant, and if you buy the full online course the GIAC materials are made available to students when updated during their certification period.
It really is unfortunate that this book doesn't deliver what it implies. It brings back memories of the plethora of low value MCSE texts that hit the market when that certification was believed to be the hot ticket to a job. They scraped the surface, but didn't really prepare you to sit in front of a machine and do the job.
If you only want to challenge the certification spend the money on the GIAC texts, not only are they directly applicable to the material tested, they are an excellent future reference.

This is a good book to use if you have never had any experience with security. It's kind of like a GSEC for Dummies. Read this book, and then take the SANS course, and use their materials to prepare for the exam. The SANS course is such an amazing program that really teaches you everything you need to know to not only create the company security policy, but how to set everything up and manage it. Logical and Hands on.

Having read through this book and fully utilizing the practice test I have to say that this book has about 10% to 25% relevance to the material you will actually be tested on. I am so glad that I have years of practical experience, attended the SANS classes and have the original SANS Material.

The tests were not easy and do require you to have intimate knowledge of the material you are being tested on.

This book and the CD of practice questions were a complete waste of time and effort.