One Week Out - AWS CCP

As the title suggest I’m one week out from my AWS CCP test. Am I nervous? Yea. I’m confident in being smart but my confidence with test taking has kinda diminished over the past 1-2 years. So I guess you wondering how I plan to get through this? So am I. Lol No, seriously I’m just studying a lot.

How I’m studying

I want to start this by saying I don’t recommend how I study to anyone. I’m going to state how I’m preparing and then I’ll give a suggestion of how you should go about this.

1. AWS Training

Amazon has a whole selection of teachers dedicated to teaching their services and certification courses. Now I want to warn you that these are as dry as turkey baked in the oven during thanksgiving BUT why not learn from the experts right? In total this course takes a standard work day to get through and has minimal interaction so if you are ok just listened to people talk (like me) while you clean or lay on the couch then go for it. There are some hands on stuff in here but I personally didn’t find them engaging enough nor did I enjoy the placements mid lecture.

2. A Cloud Guru Course

Not going to lie, I was side-eying this suggestion for awhile but I talked to my AWS expert friend and he said they were in the clear. After starting the 7 day trial I can say I really like them. I’ll probably end up keeping them for a month as I want to explore some devops stuff after I’m finished with the test. Lastly they have a practice test and for me being a bit nervous I want to get my mind right before seeing the real thing (if this was me up until 2017 I would have went in blind).

I really like that they have labs as I learn by doing. Some of the labs were things I have already done/do on a fairly frequent basis so I didn’t go through them as I watched. Things I had no experience with I atleast went to go click around to verify the info with my own eyes.

3. AWS White papers

I’m not too sure what to say here. Reading is fundamental as they say but honestly these are a bit heavy. I would say read these when you are focused or they won’t make sense at all. I kept seeing them mentioned on reddit and even in the Cloud Guru course so I didn’t want to skimp on them.

4. AWS Console

All roads lead back to hands on experience. When you’re talking tech I really don’t think you can learn anything without doing it yourself. That being said I went to play with some things in the console. I updated my s3 bucket, I tried making a free lil ubuntu ec2 instance server, and I wanted to check out the process for a CDN. All of these are things covered in the course but I’m sure as the test nears having the hands on experience will help me with the test questions.

Suggested Study Path

  1. A Cloud Guru - PLEASE DO THE LABS
  2. AWS white papers
  3. AWS Training
  4. AWS Console

I hope My prep tips can help you as you prepare for the AWS CCP exam. I tried giving some tips on twitter as well and someone mentioned taking a linux course before sitting for the test. I didn’t mention it above because I don’t 100% agree and I am fairly well versed in linux.
If you have other tips feel free to drop them in the comments to help others or send me a message to let me know.