A curated 90-day study roadmap that walks aspiring analysts from Network+ fundamentals through Linux, Python, Wireshark, the ELK stack, and authorized labs on Hack The Box and TryHackMe.

Every so often a repository succeeds not because it ships code but because it solves an organizational problem the industry has quietly failed at: sequencing foundational security education. farhanashrafdev/90DaysOfCyberSecurity is exactly that — a MIT-licensed, community-driven curriculum that packages roughly 19,400 stars' worth of consensus into a 90-day, day-by-day study plan. What makes it worth an operator's attention is not novelty but structure: it imposes an explicit dependency order on topics that beginners routinely attempt in the wrong sequence, most famously jumping to exploitation before understanding TCP/IP or a shell prompt.

The architecture of the plan is visible directly in its table of contents. Days 1–7 cover Network+ material via Professor Messer's N10-009 playlist; Days 8–14 move to Security+ concepts through the SY0-701 curriculum; Days 15–28 are Linux, built around Linux Journey, Cisco NetAcad's Linux Unhatched course, and hands-on labs on LabEx. The README is unambiguous about why this ordering exists: the author explicitly warns learners not to skip ahead to the hacking modules, framing the first 28 days as the foundation everything else builds on. That single instruction reflects real pedagogy rather than link-dumping.

The Python block, spanning Days 29–42, is deliberately over-provisioned with alternatives. It points at freeCodeCamp's beginner course, Codecademy's free-tier track, Real Python, Learn Python the Hard Way, HackerRank, and a LabEx lab series. The rationale, stated plainly in the README, is that everything in the plan must be free — if a resource sits behind a paywall, learners are told to use the listed alternatives or consult learn.md, the repository's master resource index. For a professional mentoring juniors, this makes the repo a low-friction handout: nobody gets stalled on a subscription wall mid-week.

Days 43–56 shift into traffic analysis, and this is where the curriculum starts producing genuinely employable defensive skill. The assigned material covers Wireshark through the official Wireshark University course and the guru99 tutorial, tcpdump via Daniel Miessler's well-known reference, and Suricata through its official quickstart guide. Notably, the plan teaches both interactive GUI inspection with Wireshark and CLI-based capture with tcpdump, plus an IDS/IPS perspective through Suricata — a triangulation that mirrors how SOC work is actually done, where analysts pivot between packet-level evidence and alert-driven investigation.

Days 57–63 cover Git, which many pure-security curricula skip entirely. The resources include Codecademy, Git Immersion, Try Git, and Learn Git Branching, the latter being an interactive browser-based Git CLI simulator. Framing version control as a first-class security competency is correct: nearly every detection engineering, detection-as-code, or purple-team workflow in modern enterprises runs through repositories, pull requests, and CI pipelines. An analyst who cannot read a diff is increasingly locked out of the tooling layer of the job.

Days 64–70 introduce the ELK stack — Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana — using Logz.io's complete guide and Elastic's official getting-started documentation. This is the SIEM and log-analysis module, and its placement immediately after traffic analysis is sensible: learners first understand what a packet contains, then learn how network and system telemetry gets normalized, indexed, and made searchable. For defenders, this is the single most directly job-relevant week in the plan, since entry-level SOC roles are overwhelmingly log-centric.

Days 71–77 cover cloud platforms, and the README is pragmatic about scope: it lists GCP, AWS, and Azure as interchangeable options, explicitly stating "any one of them works fine." Resources include Google Cloud Skills Boost, the gamified AWS Cloud Quest, and Microsoft Learn Azure Fundamentals labs with sandbox environments. Rather than pretending a junior can master three clouds in a week, the plan correctly treats cloud literacy — identities, consoles, basic service models — as the goal, deferring depth to on-the-job learning.

Days 78–84 are a deliberate consolidation phase: learners are told to revisit weak areas from Days 1–77, grind hands-on challenges on TryHackMe, build a home lab with VirtualBox or VMware, and ideally construct a small project combining networking, Linux, Python, and security concepts. Only then does Days 85–90 arrive at offensive work — and even here the README routes all practice to sanctioned, deliberately vulnerable environments: Hack The Box, VulnHub machines, and The Cyber Mentor's ethical hacking video series. This is textbook responsible scoping; there is no guidance anywhere in the plan for touching systems the learner does not own.

The closing bonus days, 91–95, are a career module that is unusual in how concrete it gets. Learners build a one-page resume using linked templates, save it as cv.md in Markdown, and are then walked through career-ops, a separate open-source job-search tool that runs inside AI coding CLIs like Claude Code or Codex. Installed via npx @santifer/career-ops init, it scores job postings against the resume, generates ATS-friendly PDFs, and tracks applications — while never auto-submitting on the user's behalf.

That career-ops section also contains the most operationally security-conscious paragraph in the whole README, and it deserves note because it models good hygiene for anyone pasting personal data into AI tooling. The author advises redacting sensitive fields like address and phone from cv.md before invoking any AI CLI, reviewing the tool and provider's privacy and data-retention settings first, and pinning npx installs to a specific version — with a note that @santifer/career-ops@ gives a reproducible install — rather than blindly running whatever the latest release happens to be. Supply-chain skepticism baked into a beginner curriculum is a genuinely good sign.

Operationally, the repository's own metadata tells a story of community maintenance: eleven contributors tracked via the All Contributors badge, hacktoberfest and communityexchange among its topics, a Trendshift badge, an active GitHub Discussions section reserved for questions and study groups, and issues deliberately scoped to broken links and content fixes. Translations are supported. The maintenance model — many eyes on link rot, discussion threads for learner support — is exactly what a long-lived educational artifact needs, and the star count suggests it is working.

For a senior operator, the honest assessment is that this repository will teach you nothing new technically — and that is not its job. Its value is as an onboarding accelerant: hand it to a new analyst, a career-switcher on your team, or a student mentee, and you get a pre-sequenced, free, lab-scoped curriculum that ends with defensible fundamentals across networking, Linux, scripting, Wireshark, ELK, cloud, and safely sandboxed offensive practice. In a field where junior talent is often taught incoherently, a well-ordered checklist with 19,000 endorsements is a quietly powerful artifact.

Educational analysis for authorized security professionals. Use only in controlled, authorized environments.