Welcome! Today we’ll be reviewing CompTIA CySA+ Study Guide by Mike Chapple and David Seidl.
Review Summary
- Length: 13 chapters, 496 pages
- Cover Type: Soft
- Personal Completion Time: 1 month
- TL;DR Summary: A succinct book that will cover all your CySA+ study needs; well written, to the point, and covers interesting study material. As with all certification study material I recommend you use another resource to answer some study questions to properly prepare for the exam.
- Book Link: Amazon
- Final Rating: 5 / 5 Stars
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Out of all the certifications I’ve had the pleasure of studying for, the CompTIA CySA+ (“Cyber Security Analyst Plus“) may be the most interesting. The exam, from CompTIA’s own website, is “a certification for cyber professionals tasked with incident detection, prevention and response through continuous security monitoring” and this study guide covers all of this material in an interesting and straight forward fashion. Generally speaking, the exam itself is geared more towards IT security professionals who are interested more towards the “hands on and technical” aspect of cybersecurity and less of the “managerial, framework-centric” approach taken by much of the cybersecurity landscape we see today. The topics covered in this study guide are very interesting and range from analyzing vulnerability scans, to post-incident response and recovery, to defense-in-depth security architectures; if any of these topics sound interesting to you it may be worth your time and energy to study, practice, and pass the exam.
If I remember correctly, it took me exactly one month to study, practice, and pass this exam. This was during a period of my life where I didn’t have much going on – I was working part time in a technical support position, in between college semesters, and had very little to do. This period of my life was primarily defined by 8+ hour stints in the library, studying close to 7 days a week for various certifications (CompTIA A+, Net+, Sec+, CySA+) – and it was awesome. During this period I vividly remember studying this book in particular and thinking to myself “why cant all my study material be this interesting?” and I suspect its because the CySA+ was one of the few certification exams covering interesting material! This fact doesn’t take anything away from Mike and David’s carefully crafted study guide though and instead only serves to highlight the time, care, and dedication put into this material; and while I don’t recall using a second resource (e.g. practice questions) prior to taking (and passing) this certification exam I highly recommend you do so – not because this study material is lacking in any way, but just because its the ‘smart’ thing to do prior to walking in to take a $300 exam! In conclusion – this may be the most interesting study guide I’ve read over the course of my certification studies, and that’s saying something. If you’re interested in taking the CySA+ exam at all this is likely the study guide you’ll want to use!