This looks like it will be a great course. Is this what they've changed the name to from what they were originally calling the 'GCEH'? Any particular reason they strayed away from that? Perhaps to avoid confusion?

Excellent! Thanks a lot, I look forward to your feedback.

Wish I was going...not even that far from me either.   

I also await your feedback.

This sounds like a really great course. After the webinar with Ed Skoudis the other day on the Windows command-line stuff, I called up SANS to get more information about this course (and some others).

They told me about this really cool offering called 'FlexPass.' If you (or a group) are looking to purchase multiple On Demand courses, you can receive a pretty significant discount.

http://www.sans.org/ondemand/flexpass.php

How do you guys think that this course compares with the C|EH/ LPT courseware from the EC-Council?

So you would recommend the GPEN cert over the EC-Council stuff?

For the benefit for all the readers, here is what Ed Skoudis had to say, quote ..

To help you understand how it differentiates from CEH, I put together this list of bullet points:


This SANS course differs from other penetration testing and ethical hacking courses in several important ways:
• We get deep into the tools arsenal, with numerous hands-on exercises that show subtle, less-well-known, and undocumented features that are incredibly useful for professional penetration testers and ethical hackers.
• The course discusses how the tools inter-relate with each other in an overall testing process. Rather than just throwing up a bunch of tools and playing with them, we analyze how to leverage information from one tool to get the most bang out of the next tool.
• We focus on the workflow of professional penetration testers and ethical hackers, proceeding step-by-step discussing the most effective means for conducting projects.
• The sessions address common pitfalls that arise in penetration tests and ethical hacking projects, providing real-world strategies and tactics for avoiding these problems to maximize the quality of test results.
• We cover several timesaving tactics based on years of in-the-trenches experience from real penetration testers and ethical hackers, actions that might take hours or days unless you know the little secrets we'll cover that will let you surmount a problem in minutes.
• The course stresses the mind-set of successful penetration testers and ethical hackers, which involves balancing the often contravening forces of creative "outside-the-box" thinking, methodical trouble-shooting, carefully weighing risks, following a time-tested process, painstakingly documenting results, and creating a high quality final report that achieves management and technical buy-in.
• We also analyze how penetration testing and ethical hacking should fit into a comprehensive enterprise information security program.

Hope this helps. I post more once i come back from the course.