These are my personal opinions based on my background and training experience.
This course is online.
The course materials really depend on which version of the course you purchase. With the Elite version, you get downloadable PDFs and videos.
The class size is single user.
The lab environment is single user.
At the time of this review, the course prices were listed as follows (Check the web site for actual prices!)
$1,199 Barebone
$1,299 Full
$1,599 Elite
I had just finished Penetration Testing with Kali Linux (PWK) by Offensive Security and I suddenly felt a void in my life. I wanted to keep going with offensive security and penetration testing, and I found eLearnSecurity, and I signed up for Penetration Testing Professional (PTP).
I got this class after finishing the Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP) exam, and I jumped in to the slides. As I read the slides and watched the videos, I started realizing that I was suddenly learning the "why" of what I had done in the PWK labs. I realized that I knew how to exploit things based off all the time and effort of PWK, but I didn't fully understand why the exploit was working. As I sit writing this, I am trying to remember what the topic that my "ah-ha" moment was about so I can better explain what I mean, so unless I can remember and come back and edit this part, I will post a simple example:
Let's use an example of a web exploit. I could download the exploit script, I could change certain parts of the exploit script, and I could run the exploit and catch a call back. And while I might have known how a website worked at a higher level, getting more into the GET and POST and the situation where one is used and why that matters, I might have been clueless about that. When I fully understood what was going on behind the scenes, I suddenly saw other possibilites of what I could try. The more advanced example would be understanding the difference between synchronous and asynchronous communications and IppSec's forward shell and why that is needed at times.
It was around this time that I started telling everyone how great I thought the eLearnSecurity content was. And friends starting signing up for class and telling me how much they liked the content. (And today I was listening to another person review an eLearnSecurity course that I have been slowly going through...very slowly...and this person was talking about how the "learn on your own" vs the "let us help you learn but not give you all the answers" was a big reason he liked eLearnSecurity.) For me, I need a little bit of both. I need a little bit of "do this all on your own" but with a lot of "here are nudges when you need them", then at times I need a "do this all on your own" and other times I need a "let me teach you but not 'do' for you."
And at this point, I want to break in my review, and come back to it later. Why, because after reading the PDFs and watching the videos, and learning a bunch of new stuff, I raced out and signed up for other labs and did other things. I have never logged in and done the labs, or taken the test, associated with this class. Luckily, I have the Elite version and it says I have a test attempt waiting on me. And I have always wanted to finish this, so I might as well go back through everthing (I got the updated version at a discount) and take the test.