[Article]-CEH: Exam Prep 2 - Technical Foundations of Hacking

[don]

Book Review and Sample Chapter - "CEH: Exam Prep 2"

http://www.ethicalhacker.net/content/view/50/2/

This is the only place to offer a full chapter from the yet to be released Exam Prep book from Que Publishing. This book was just awarded to 2 lucky winners as part of CSP Mag's Free Monthly Giveaways. Enjoy!

Post your thought below.

[Kev]

I thought this was a very well done book. So much better than any of the course material and books from the EC-Council. I would put it as a must have for a CEH canidate.

[don]

Being the editor of this site and CSP Mag, I'm more sensitive to typos, bad grammar and poor sentence structure. This one had its share, but the content was nonetheless good. Also, considering there are many books on pen testing / ethical hacking, but not many specifically geared towards CEH and the course modules, overall, I'd say this one is a keeper.

Don

[Sniganoo]

I purchased this book a few weeks ago and have read it once and will read it again before taking the CEH exam.  If you compare the objectives to the EC Council course outline then it looks like this book does not cover evverything yet it covers stuff that may not be in the exam but relevant to Ethical Hacking nonetheless. 

As an exam prep I would have preferred the book to mirror the EC Council objectives a little closer.  I think this book is trying to cover ethical hacking in a logical manner as well as being a guide for the exam and that never really works for me.  If it says exam prep then that's what I want it to be.

I do not have the EC Council literature but I do have the course slides so I cannot really comment on how well this prepares you for the exam.  It is a well written book, with some grammatical errors but nothing major.  Until I take the exam I will not know how well this book prepares you for the test so I will hold judgement on that.

It is worth getting in my opinion.

[BillV]

I'm surprised no one else has posted anything about this yet...

I bought this book as I saw several people had mentioned it was a good read before the CEH exam. I have read through it and taken my notes already, so I decided to take the written test in the back (110 questions). As I was comparing my answers to the answers in the back, I noticed several that just didn't make sense to me as to how I could have gotten them wrong. Upon further inspection, I noticed that some of the letters in the back, did not correspond with their correct letters in the question. The text explanation and answers all seem fine, just some letter mix-ups. It's a little confusing when you're just comparing letter-to-letter. Here are the fixes:

A. 27: D should be C
A. 31: B should be D
A. 40: B should be C
A. 51: B should be A

I suppose it's a good sign of preparedness that I can recognize when my answers should be correct, right??

Hope this helps someone

- V

[Negrita]

Hi venom77. After reading your post I went to check my copy of this book. I still have my answers marked in pencil at the back of the book and my answers all correspond with yours. I also noticed these mistakes while studying for the exam but never got round to posting anything about them.

Another thing that really irritated me about this book was the ExamGear test engine included on the CD which accompanies the book. The exam asks no questions at all about chapter 11 (Buffer Overflows, Viruses and Worms). I compensated for this by re-reading that particular chapter many times and re-doing the printed questions at the end of the chapter. The exam also seemed to have only one pool of 125 questions, so after you've done it once, the questions repeat themselves. I even tried to log on to the exam prep web site to download updates for the exam (as the book itself reccomends) but none were available.