Reddit reviews CompTIA Security+ Study Guide Authorized Courseware: Exam SY0-301
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I used the older version of this book.
http://www.amazon.com/CompTIA-Security-Study-Guide-SY0-301/dp/1118014731/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1312818106&sr=8-3
I believe this is the new book as they changed the test ~May 1st. Go to the CompTIA site to figure out which is the new test (pretty sure it's 301), and then buy this series for that test.
That said, after I read this book, I grabbed an exam dump from examcollection.com and studied that as well. I went through and took it straight, then looked for the answers I got wrong and studied WHY I got them wrong back in the source material. I know that's not a popular way to study around here, but it's effective.
It looks like the site cram.com (which isn't a porn site, oddly enough) lets you create your own flashcards. I've used the ExamCram books and there are others that have electronic flash cards or other fun things. If you sail any high seas, you can find them there too I'm sure.
If you're already thinking about looking for other jobs and are looking to get your Bachelor's, look at local colleges. A lot of places will offer tuition reimbursement or will cover your courses completely, which is fantastic if you can find it. Smaller shops also let you get your hands into a lot of different tools that you might not otherwise get to play with, which gives you experience and lets you refine what your career goals are.
For networking, I'm terrible at that too. I've found local user groups in my area (or within a couple hours from my city) that I go to frequently. There's a quarterly tech ed group, a quarterly System Center group, a powershell group, and even a generic sysadmin group. I had no idea they were out there until I started looking. Most of the time the "small talk" is about what's on our plates at work, how we're having trouble filling some position, how we got killed by xyz vulnerability/some Microsoft patch boned us, or how our kids are keeping us up and we're so tired. Each of the groups has a LinkedIn page too, but most of the meat is in the face-to-face interactions.
People inherently like to talk about themselves--if you strike up a conversation with someone and say "I overheard you guys talking about the ShellShock vulnerability, here's how we handled it." they'll just say "Oh, cool." and turn away. But if you were to say "I wasn't listening in, but I overheard you guys talking about Shellshock... It killed us...I mean, I should probably still be at work right now. How'd you guys handle it?" and then they'll launch into Puppet or Zabbix or Nagios or some tech that they use and you can ask them about that, too. It sounds exhausting, because it kind of is, but the connections actually come in really useful.