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CISSP All-in-One Exam Guide, Third Edition Review by Anthony Fowlie
Tough to get through, but worth it!
I recently received word from ISC2 that I passed the CISSP exam. I'll be the first to admit that I test very well (used 2.25 of the 6 hours for the test), but I have to give credit to Shon Harris for this excellent book which helped me bring together all the information needed for this exam.
It's definitely true to read people describe the exam as a "mile wide and inch deep", so it shouldn't come as any great surprise to find this book is huge (~1,000 pages), and while it is technical in some areas, it is only superficially so. All the topics are covered at about the right depth to be aligned well with the exam.
My only quibbles are very minor, such as the by-lines at the beginnings of sections that started out cute, but became very irritating as they devolved into a sarcastic tone, and a lack of organization to the quick round-up of the concepts at the end of each chapter. Otherwise, this book is the entirity of the knowledge you will need to pass, but memorizing everything in the book isn't going to cut it - you will need a modicum of real-world experience to allow you to lay all this information out in a framework that meshes with how things actually work in the world.
Buy this book, read it thoroughly, apply a liberal amount of common sense, then pass the test.