Three Pre-Reviews

Three generous publishers sent me three books to review this week. The first is Apress' Pro Nagios 2.0 by James Turnbull. This is the second book on Nagios on my reading list. I plan to deploy Nagios on my test network to gain a better understanding of how it works. I will use both books and compare and contrast them once I've finished each.

The second book is O'Reilly's IPv6 Essentials, 2nd Ed by Silvia Hagen. I did not read the first edition, because by the time I gained interest in IPv6 newer books were published. For example, I really liked Apress' Running IPv6 and O'Reilly's IPv6 Network Administration. I plan to deploy an IPv6 testbed soon, so I will use this new book to help that project. I'll compare the new book to the two older texts.

I'm hesitant to mention this last book, because I don't plan to read it. (I only review books that I read.) I don't plan to read Syngress' Dictionary of Information Security by Robert Slade. If you peruse reviews of this author's other books at Amazon.com, they are uniformly bad. I am surprised that Mr. Slade managed to get luminaries like Fred Cohen, Peter Neumann, and Gene Spafford to contribute forewords to this book.

If someone is going to write a "dictionary," they should take it seriously. This comment on the back of the book encouraged me not to read it: "Don't be fooled by the refreshing lack of pomposity and the occasional jokey entry." A "jokey entry" in a book by someone who claims to be "facilitating the ISC(2) CBK review seminar"?

I'll also save you the trouble of seeing if I have some sort of personal problem with Mr. Slade by pointing you to his negative review of Real Digital Forensics, a book I co-authored, along with two of the world's best forensics experts. (These are people who have testified in court.) I think he hammered RDF because I refused to review his "forensics" book Software Forensics. I think this comment by reviewer Eric Kent says it best: Software Forensics "is a book by a person who clearly has no real world experience in the world of digital forensic investigations." Ouch.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Software Forensics! I've bought that book when it first came out, and have since donated it to the library. I can honestly say that it was by far the worst book I have ever read, and I read quite a bit. It was 215 pages, with the last 50+ pages being nothing but advertisements for other books. I'm not sure what his target audience was either because he had a chapter or two on detecting plagiarism in research papers. It was the first book I ever read where I didn't learn anything. The negative reviews on Amazon are accurate. It was a complete waste of money.
10:59 AM
Anonymous said…
I'm less than 48 hours out of my CISSP exam and somehow I'm not surprised that a turkey is working on the ISC(2) CBK. Then again I know the CISSP doesnt hold a really good rep around these parts.
1:10 AM
Richard Bejtlich said…
Hi Chris,

Any chance you will post something about your CISSP experience? Thank you.
8:19 AM
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