TLDR - I was not a fan of Stephane Maarek's course on Udemy, it did not feel like he went over stuff as thoroughly as I would've liked, but it was what I used as far as video material goes. I mainly used TutorialsDojo and I've been using that for about a month and a half at this point. I started watching Maarek's course back in early June and finished late August, picked up TD tests early September. I used Gemini thoroughly to help go over a lot of concepts to try to figure out what it did in better detail by taking screenshots of the TD questions I got wrong and making Word docs to review. Passed with almost 800. *No real AWS experience in my job field, only other related certs are the AZ-900 and CompTIA Sec+.
If you can, set aside a solid 2 or 3 weeks, go through the videos, do deep dives into TD exams, and then that should be the bulk of what you need, it should not have taken me 4.5 months to clear this.
To explain a bit more, while I was watching Maarek's videos, i was also taking down notes as thoroughly as I could, damn near copying the slides sometimes word for word. As a result, it more than tripled the length of time it took for me to go through the videos, and on top of that, it was during periods of time where I was constantly having to get interrupted. Admittedly I wasn't really watching the videos on my days off, so I wasn't putting in 100% of the effort to go through the course like I could have, but this is one thing I wish I did differently:
- Just blitz through the videos, taking down rough notes rather than copy things one to one.
I should NOT have bothered with the detailed note taking at THIS point, this should have been just an introduction to the concepts as a whole and I should've just put things like 'EC2s - basically your VMs' and 'S3s - storage'. Given how kinda iffy Maarek went through everything, taking as long as I did to go through it all did not help. I also, admittedly, should've just skipped a chunk of the hands-on, as honestly the more difficult concepts were ones that would not have been covered by him anyway. Maybe they'll help out others but it seemed like learning how things worked conceptually is more important for the test, while setting up the environment in real time is more practical to actually using it, so I say maybe if you want to try to speed things up and the hands-on isn't helping, try doing them after you get the cert? It could be me but those are my thoughts, if everyone else says 'do the hands-on' and you try it and you feel like it does help then godspeed friend.
Once I got done with his videos, I jumped into TD and frankly this is where I got both humbled and learned a SIGNIFICANTLY larger amount of AWS stuff compared to the videos. I ended up doing 4 of the Review Mode sets twice each, only a few of the topic and section based sets, and did about 5 Randomized Test sets. My scores broke down as such:
| Review Set 1-Attempt 1: 57 |
Review Set 1-Attempt 2: 83 |
Review Set 2-Attempt 1: 41 |
Review Set 2-Attempt 2: 83 |
| Review Set 3-Attempt 1: 63 |
Review Set 3-Attempt 2: 78 |
Review Set 4-Attempt 1: 64 |
Review Set 4-Attempt 2: 81 |
| Random Set 1-66 |
Random Set 2-83 |
Random Set 3-75 |
Random Set 4-71 |
and then my final score on the fifth Random Set was 74.
This was the part where I REALLY started to use Gemini and cross-reference other sources, as well as found out some things that I'm fairly certain where never touched on with the videos. In the middle of all this I also got the notes and video course from Jon Bonso on TD, and really just kind of referred to the videos for certain topics to get a different explanation. The videos seemed to be significantly better but I also didn't go through all of them so don't hold it against me if it turns out they aren't, could just be frustration and bias against Maarek, I'll fully admit.
Throughout the tests, the big thing I ended up doing was using Gemini to review over the questions I got wrong and tried to figure out WHY I got them wrong, and the big thing I did was in the View Results pop-up, I went to the questions I flagged but got right and the questions I got wrong, got screenshots of the question and the choices, put everything into a Word Doc, and then had Gemini extract the text and post it, then just copied that back into the Word Doc, going over one last review to make sure it didn't hallucinate the questions (it did that a few times so go over everything before you save the Doc with the new questions) - I went about it this way because frankly TD is kinda booty cheeks about getting this stuff put into a Word doc, trying to print it out and turn it into an adobe file and then turn that into a Word doc failed. I tried to get fancy when, no, just taking screenshots and sending them to Gemini and just doing 1 to 1 extractions worked out significantly faster, only had to make a few changes.
After I got my test compilations together, I pulled both the Word doc, the TD questions, and Gemini up and through Gemini, went through each and every question to try to figure out why I was wrong or why I was right if it was a flagged question.
- This is where I should've been taking those thorough, deep-dive notes. Between TD's explanations and Gemini, I was able to learn a lot more about the topics and be able to have them better stick to my memory, and while I did end up taking those notes, it still took me longer than it should've to get here.
- This is ALSO where I should've made a separate set of notes, and that being 'exam triggers' - for the purposes of actually learning the material it was great that I went through everything the way that I did, but being able to quickly associate specific words with specific services or resources helped me catch a few questions that I likely would've gotten wrong.
- I also sadly spent too much time on a bunch of flash cards that I didn't really end up using, the flash cards on TD weren't really that useful, and if anything I should've been making the cards exclusively on topics that I wasn't familiar with or keen on the details of to begin with. I also should've done a bit more research on other study methods that could've used the cards, given how all this is set up, the best I did was make some that had a service/resource, some of its capabilities, and then did my best to memory match them, but making sure I had all the relevant details was key, as I actually missed a few of them.
A lot of the questions in TD helped me understand a lot of the material better, but there was a bit of confusion here and there - some of my research made it seem like some topics were not going to be covered but then it turned out they were. Different parts of the SAA cert as a whole are going to be harder and easier for others, but for me, the toughest parts to thoroughly dissect were S3 and the extremely finer details of it, along with databases and understanding the ins and outs of High Availability and Disaster Recovery and any auto-scaling capabilities or how to enable them. I would HIGHLY recommend going over all of the Review Mode questions, and then tracking the general topics you seem to be consistently getting wrong - is it Aurora, S3, DynamoDB, networking, etc, just something like 'Topic Name' in one column and then a count in the other. Like everyone is going to inevitably say, you DO need to understand WHY you got a question wrong, and the best way to figure THAT out is to actually keep a good track of it.
Yes this was a giant wall of text but hopefully anyone who needed more than just 'I passed and I watched some videos and did some tests' got some useful information from this. If you did get anything useful from this then great and good luck.
