How should i prepare for CCSE certification ?

[G_W_Albrecht]

After attending the CCSE class you can go thru the content again and work in a Lab environment to get more hands on experience.

[Timothy_Hall]

Beyond the official CCSE courseware there isn't much out there.  Once you have reviewed the courseware and done the labs try taking the CCSE practice exam (156-604) for $50 USD through VUE, which draws its questions from the same pool used by the actual exam.

[Harald_Hansen]

I recently took the exam and passed. There is a pool of 300 questions, 100 are randomly selected. I was finished after 45 minutes, having revised every question.

My experience this time is a lot of typos and weird sentences, questions about legacy technology and the usual trap questions. Read every questions twice, run through the entire test and mark whatever questions for follow up. 

You'll pass if you have at least a year experience working with the firewalls themselves, that is work in clish/expert, not SmartConsole only. 

The CCSE course is ok, though always way behind the latest release. The upside, as mentioned, the exams are behind as well.

The course will give access to labs, though you should have your own as well. Take advantage of the 15 day eval or ask for 30 day licenses (you'll need two for cluster). Try to replicate a cluster within your own environment and break/repair stuff. Upgrading a couple major versions with the various strategies and adding jumbo hotfix upgrades will give insight into the process.

• Be well prepared for performance, ClusterXL and CoreXL related questions.
• Test the fw commands mentioned in the various SK articles regarding performance and basic troubleshooting.
• There are multiple scripts in this community that are extracting performance and troubleshooting info, try to understand the inner working of those as well.

The Max Power book by Timothy Hall is good, though it is probably a better read to be a good Check Point admin, not to pass the CCSE test ...