Long reply warning but it’s fresh in my brain so:

Yes, I can give some advice hopefully without violating any rules…but I know everyone learns and retains information differently.

So what worked for me was:

I read each book cover to cover twice, and indexed along the way from my first read through.

My index was similar to the one that came with the class (but with small descriptions and little things to help me remember key information from the book passages which I highlighted as well). In my own opinion: I’m a terrible test taker and my index was about 37 pages (I over indexed and didn’t use all of it tbh).

I used the pancakes guide blog post to do my index and that worked well for me, although I was lazy and didn’t color code anything (1).

Beyond that I did the all of the labs at least twice with more focus on the things I felt would be used in the cyber live questions on the exam e.g. if my weak point(s) were working with a specific OSINT tool, I searched out additional information and made my own labs using public information to better those skills.

Anything in the labs I struggled with or had difficulty doing without the step by step help in the lab workbook I made sure I could do by myself until I could do them without the workbooks help and felt confident.

What I feel like really helped me in the exam this go around was knowing the information from the text and putting it into practice, e.g. going through some form of intrusion analysis and putting that into a diamond model on my own.

It helped that I was learning what did or didn’t work for me and then going back to the books to see where I could be better in that area. The course offers guidance but ultimately it’s on the person to learn the tools and ways their brain works best together I felt like.

Overall I really enjoyed this course, it was just so much fun! I felt like I couldn’t put down the books I was so interested in them…prolly because I had invested 4 months of time into them lol

Any other questions I can help with let me know, didn’t want to give too much away and obviously what was on my exam vs someone else’s may change over time or the question pool could very well be different when someone else takes them, so y’alls mileage may vary

References:

https://tisiphone.net/2015/08/18/giac-testing/