Don,

Thanks for your quick reply.

The two certs I have to accomplish do overlap a huge amount. This was on purpose as the second cert is the one I really wanted (GIAC SANS SEC504). This course is very very expensive in terms of the cost of the training aswell as flights and acommodation too. As I work for myself having the time off work is out of the question so self-study is my only option. There is very little 3rd party study material. In fact there is no other self-study material available only from SANS after you've paid your money (?1800+)

Because of this I chose the first cert (EC-Council Ethical Hacker) as there was so much more accessible self-study material which was far cheaper.

The overall plan is to pass the first and then pass the second with hopefully not a lot much more studying to do between them.

I've not really sat down and studied something like this since leaving school and so looked around at ways to improve my studying skills. This is when I discovered MindMapping. Do you have any experience of it?

I agree aboout your comments on booking the date. The problem I have is that I can't always dedicate a fixed amount of time per week and therefore scheduling the exam date proves difficult. Due to other commitments its difficult for me to plan too far ahead. Maybe this is simply procrastination :D

How did you work through the material? Did you read through each section and then write down your own notes? And then when all the sections were complete just re-read your notes?

I'd be interested to hear what other methods people use to learn. Is it just repetition or have some people used context mapping ?

I do see great benefits with Mind Mapping but the problem I've found is that mapping out material from a technical course that is 22 sections long you end up with a massive unprintable mindmap. The approach I've had is to press play on the online study material and then mind map notes section by section. Association plays a massive part in improving the map as do images. But taking 6-8 weeks mapping this out the last thing you want to do is to go back over it all again and put in associations or images to strengthen your memory recall.

I've seen another great app called RecallPlus which claims to work wonders but using this whilst working through your material can prove to be time consuming as are MindMaps.

Grateful for any help.

Jason