Finally after a year of on/off studying, I passed the CompTIA Security+ exam.
For a quick overview, before I started studying, I used TryHackMe, took most of Jeremy’s IT CCNA course, and took David Bombal’s Intro to Ethical Hacking course on Udemy.
I started studying for the Sec+ by taking Jason Dion’s course on Udemy – I found it really dense and a lot of it seemed overkill. I took about half the course, and then switched to using Professor Messer’s videos.
https://www.professormesser.com/security-plus/sy0-601/sy0-601-video/sy0-601-comptia-security-plus-course/
These videos are really jam packed – I took very extensive notes and still missed things. It took me about 2 months of light study to finally get through his video course. After I started taking practice tests, if there were things I didn’t remember, I went right back to these videos.
Even after that, there were a few concepts I didn’t fully get, so for those I used this video course:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Hd8QJmZQUc&ab_channel=InsideCloudandSecurity
It comes at the material from a slightly different angle, and between Messer and InsideCloud it covers all of the material.
The next thing I did was prepare for the Practice Based Questions (PBQs) – I had 3 on my test. This channel was GREAT for understanding what to expect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbuqjgBziFQ&ab_channel=Cyberkraft
Lastly, there is a VERY extensive acronym list that must be learned – I think it was around 325 acronyms. For that, I made Anki Flash Cards. I used the full acronym list combined with ChatGPT to make the list. Then I used this site to convert to a format that Anki can read: https://www.convertcsv.com/html-table-to-csv.htm – Then download the result (click the button at the bottom) and import into Anki.
And finally I took some Practice Tests. Well, a LOT of practice tests. This is what I used:
CompTia Security+ App (by Thanh Hung) and https://www.examcompass.com/comptia/security-plus-certification/free-security-plus-practice-tests
If you’re reading this, you CAN do it! It’s extensive, but manageable. Good luck!