CISSP All-in-One Exam Guide, Second Edition (All-in-One)

Author: Shon Harris List Price: $79.99 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0072229667 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media (17 June, 2003) Edition: Hardcover Sales Rank: 1,943 Average Customer Rating: 4.07 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

Writing style is unbelievably poor and appropriate for girl's magazines, but not for a serious IT or technical book. The book is so irritating that I spent twice as much time reading it as I would have with another book on similar subject. Although all domains are somewhat covered in the book, they are not exact match for the requirements described in CBK. Some concepts described in official ISC2 course are not mentioned at all, while other, which are irrelevant to the exam contents are described in fine details on tens of pages.

Definitions in the book are fairly accurate since they are taken from other documents, but examples given to visualize them are amusing, to be polite. It appears that author has never actually performed any real work, but spent all her life teaching something she read from the books. Thus you can read that application level protocols are HTTP, FTP and WWW, or that DLL interprets voltages. In each chapter there are at least few amusements.

CD is nothing to write home about, if you need good questions go for Krutz&Russel editions.

All in all, don't waste your time over this book. If you have ever been on a course where instructor does not know what he is talking about, you'll know how I felt after reading this book.

The book covered areas of which I was both familiar and unfamiliar. The sections on the Orange Book and Common Criteria were entirely new to me. The sections on the OSI model and cryptography were not. Faithfully, I took each practice exam at the end of each chapter and scored an average of 92% throughout the book.

Come exam day, I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were virtually no questions that the book did not cover. Yes the exam asked more questions in some areas than others, but the book did cover the material.

I completed the exam in half the allotted time and walked out confident that I had passed (and easily). A few weeks later my suspicions were confirmed when I received my notification that I had passed.

So what's it mean to you? To me, it means this book is capable of getting you a passing score on the CISSP exam. So, buy this book and read it cover to cover. If you find there are areas that you just don't get or can't absorb, then sure, find another source to fill in the blanks for you. Otherwise, go confidently into the exam room knowing you've done an appropriate amount of preparation and enjoy the experience!

I've just got a confirmation that I passed the test, and I used only this book for studying. So that books is definitly not a joke and can get you through.

Why the reviews are so different?

First, the author's style. It's more like recorded lectures then a reference. The author included some jokes and funny examples. They are perfectly correct, not abusive, they add some spice to a highly proffesional text and I personally love them because they make reading that huge book not so boring, but looks like the fact the style is different drives some people mad.

Second, the nature of the exam. The covered area is very wide and includes more topic then most people normally know and use. So many readers think the topics they know the best could be written better. The problem is because of so wide coverage you can not go deeper then a certain level. The book is almost 1000 pages long and I personally think it's well balanced and provides adequate knowledge for the test. Yes, some chapters could be extended but then you'd be overwhelmed by the volume and I doubt it would improve your passing score significantly.

Some people complained about mistakes. Well, it's true, there are some. But, it's the same idea here. They are not crucial and don't really affect your score much.

It's like if you need to get to the airport and you friend offers help you don't really care what car he has. But if you go to dealership to buy a car every minor option gets so important. Same idea here. If your goal is to pass the test, the book can be used as the only training material and provides adequate up-to-date information in a resonable volume for a pretty cheap price. The book does it's job and does it well. It also has some personality so you may love or hate it, but it's just your emotional perception. The knowledge is there.

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