Reddit reviews Windows Forensic Analysis DVD Toolkit

It really depends on what niche you're looking on covering. It's difficult, I feel, to brush up on "infosec" to any level of practical proficiency without focusing on a few subsets. Based on your interests, I would recommend the following books.

General Hacking:

Hacking Exposed

The Art of Exploitation

The Art of Deception



Intrusion Detection / Incident Response:

Network Flow Analysis

The Tao of Network Security Monitoring

Practical Intrusion Analysis

Real Digital Forensics


Reverse Engineering:

Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering

The Ida Pro Book

Malware Analyst Cookbook

Malware Forensics



Digital Forensics:

File System Forensic Analysis

Windows Forensic Analysis

Real Digital Forensics

The Rootkit Arsenal


Hope this helps. If you're a University student, you might have access to Safari Books Online, which has access to almost all of these books, and more. You can also purchase a personal subscription for like $23 a month. It's a bit pricey, but they have an awesome library of technical books.

Aside from SANS FOR508 (the course on which the cert is based) the following helped me:

Windows Registry Forensics

Windows Forensic Analysis Toolkit 2nd ed

Windows Forensic Analysis Toolkit 4th ed

The 2nd edition covers XP, the 4th covers 7/8

Digital Forensics with Open Source Tools

File System Forensic Analysis

This is a new book, but I imagine it'll help as well:

The Art of Memory Forensics

I read many of these in preparation for taking mine, but your best resource are the SANS class/books which is what the cert tests after. Having a good index is key.

There may be other classes out there that might help, but I have no firsthand experience with them, so I can't say what I recommend. All the above books, however, are amazing. Very much worth your time and money.

Brian Carriers book on File System Forensics is a must, http://www.amazon.com/System-Forensic-Analysis-Brian-Carrier/dp/0321268172

Next, any of Harlan Carvey's Books. These cover the basic (as well as advanced) Windows Artifacts such as the Registry, Event Logs and Timeline creations. He also has lots of open source tools that he demonstrates in the books:

http://www.amazon.com/Windows-Forensic-Analysis-Toolkit-Second/dp/1597494224/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414266778&sr=1-5&keywords=harlan+Carvey

Check out the free SANS Webcasts in their archives. Lots of good videos on forensic and security related topics. They also have a free forensic tool called "SIFT" which is a VM loaded with free/open source forensic tools (LINUX based)

https://www.sans.org/webcasts/archive