Review of Penetration Tester's Open Source Toolkit Posted

Amazon.com just published my three star review of Penetration Tester's Open Source Toolkit. From the review:

I am not sure why Penetration Tester's Open Source Toolkit (PTOST) was published. If you have no other security assessment books, you may find PTOST helpful. Otherwise, I don't believe this book offers enough value to justify purchasing it. Other books -- some published by Syngress -- cover some of the same ideas, and 5 of PTOST's chapters are published in other books anyway.

Comments

Richard Bejtlich said…
Hi David,

The answer is "essentially," with the exceptions noted in the reviews. I decided to spend the last 10 days or so reading for most of the day and consulting for an hour or two. It's the only way to clear my book queue. Note that Syngress books are incredibly easy to tear through -- the fonts are huge, most books have summary and question sections that can be ignored, and some books reprint old material that I also ignore.
3:29 PM
Richard Bejtlich said…
Hi David,

In January I posted Syngress' response to my original discussions of chapter reprints.

If you don't like the practice, I recommend sending email to Andrew Williams (Andrew at Syngress dot com) telling him.

Please remember that I've reviewed about a dozen Syngress books recently. Of those, 1 book got 2 stars, 2 books got 3 stars, 6 books got 4 stars, and 2 books got 5 stars. Syngress is publishing good books, but they should know customers don't like reprinting chapters.
3:54 PM
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