Review by Andrew Johnson CISSP, GPEN, eCPPT, OSWP, CCNA:S, MCSE:S, et al

It’s rare for an organization to quickly rise to prominence through the release of a new training course, but that’s exactly what eLearnSecurity did with the first release of their Penetration Testing Professional course back in 2010. This upstart company is based in Pisa, Italy with a location in the USA in Colorado as well, but the beauty is that their training is entirely online, so clearly travel is not required.  This review covers the second release of Penetration Testing Professional (affectionately known as PTP2), which most notably contains expanded content and new lab environments.

The course is delivered through a web-based Flash interface. The presentation will be familiar to anyone who has experience with the first iteration of the course, but at the same time the overall feel is cleaner and more polished. A colleague was recently considering web app training, and he was torn between a book and this course. He stated something along the lines of, “My brain is telling me to be economical and just get a book, but my eyes are telling me to go with eLearnSecurity!” That statement sums up the visual experience perfectly.

Continue reading to see if they managed to carry that momentum into the rest of the new version of this course.

Thanks for the thorough review.  The course sounds like a lot of fun.  It's too bad that the cert only covers web apps and doesn't test the other material.