Although we ran out of attendance forms, please accept my contention that a dozen showed up (including some incoming new HAL members) and we began the HLUG Saturday meeting with my description of the CompTIA manual for the Security+ certification. This particular book is the one by Pastore and Dulaney. It refers to exam SYO-101 and the edition copyright is 2004, with the first edition having come out in 2003.
There was no video shot of the meeting, so there will be no record of any rude comments regarding any inaccuracies found in the current edition of the CompTIA/Sybex printing. True, the Macintosh material appeared about 11 years out of date (claiming that TCP/IP capability had been added "recently") and page 212's sample directory structure of Linux/Unix systems was... inventive (using backslashes instead of forward slashes). But in October we can expect a new test, and new testing study materials to shortly follow.
I saw many similarities in structure between the above material, though, and the CISSP manual I have. All chapters in the manual for the Certified Information Systems Security Professional and the CompTIA book in question had analogues of each other with the exception of the one in CISSP on application security (the writing of secure code). That's just as well; high-order languages are beyond my pay grade right now.
But the Security+ cert is, even prior to the upcoming improvements, a good dry run for more difficult certs for two reasons. First, the material is generally the same (covering such predictable topics as OS patching, physical security and risk management). Second, unlike SSIP and CISSP, Security+ is inexpensive ($258 at present) and requires no documentation as to previous experience in computer security, as well as no sponsorship by one's current employer.
They'll even let me take the thing.
So stay tuned for a future report when I acquire the cert. Coming up on the second Saturday of September, Linux/Unix Best Practices for Backups from Russell Adams. 'Til then...
