Hello again!
Man, time has flown by, and despite my best intentions of regular posts her on Medium, I get bogged down with life, work, and school, and quite a while goes by between posts.
Last post left you hanging with some cryptography knowledge, and while the information is valuable for you the reader, it was mostly for myself and my preparation for the exam. I have found that writing about a subject, in a way that you can teach others, is valuable, in that it cements the knowledge into your brain and really shows you where gaps in your knowledge are.
The good news is that I passed my cryptography class at WGU the first try. The test was sufficiently difficult for an introductory level course. There were a couple points where I was really scratching my head about what the correct answer was. Thankfully I passed the exam and moved onto the next course.
The next course in line was Data Management Foundations! This course was interesting to me, because I knew very little about the subject matter before starting the class. This is the first of two data management courses I have in my degree plan. It introduced me to data, information, and how to turn that into knowledge. It showed me how to properly arrange the data, in a useful and clear way, so that I could enter the information onto a table, which could then be searched and utilized by a database management utility. I learned a ton of new terms, and some basic SQL commands. This course was challenging because the information was so new to me, but I was able to study and learn the material sufficiently enough, that I was able to pass the final exam this last Sunday.
I started the next course, which is called Data Management Applications. I am really excited for this course, because you actually have to do some hands-on labs and part of the final exam will be on properly structuring SQL queries, in addition to the normal multiple-choice questions that test your knowledge of the topics.
While I have been dealing with life, working full time, going to school full time, and taking care of my family, I have been able to spend a little bit of my free time on TryHackMe. I really love that site, and I always leave having learned something new. Yes the lessons are sort of like games, but I always enjoy doing the tasks and making progress. I promised myself that I would finish the complete beginner pathway before jumping into any of the other pathways or challenges, and I am glad that I did. They design it so that one lesson flows into the next one, topic into topic, and by the time you are complete, you will have all the basic knowledge to start the other paths. I still have a couple more things to do on the complete beginner pathway, but I will be done soon. I will keep you posted.
