Customer Reviews

Guide to Computer Forensics and Investigations, Second Edition

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

College Professors Listen Up! This is not the book to use for teaching Computer Forensics and Investigation. I am a student in a graduate course for Computer Forensics. The fact that this book uses strictly commercial software for all the exercises is sad. Especially since there are many Open Source tools available that can be used to conduct Computer Forensics. The software included with this book requires that the buyer obtain a license from the vendor, before the software can be used. Then the license is only good for 120 days. This is not fair to the buyer especially for students, who usually have no intent of keeping the book past the end of the semester. It would be better to use a book for the class that the students would find worth keeping for the long term. Also, a book that uses Open Source tools for the examples/exercises, would provide much more value to the students. A much better book to use would be 'Incident Response and Computer Forensics, 2nd Ed' by Chri Prosise, Kevin Mandia and Matt Pepe. If this book does not suite you, then I am sure that you can find another book to use.

This book is better than the previous edition, but there are still problems with the information. As another student posted about a case project. The evidence proved the employee innocent. This is just the beginning of other problems that you will find with the book.

Buy at your own risk!

This is a textbook for computer forensics. It should be introduction to computer forensics. The book discuss overview of procedures and expectations of a computer forensic investigator. The technical sections in the book uses software to find information. Unfortunately, this information is basic and review for computer nerds.

THIS IS AN UPDATE. I just finished using this book for my class. We went through all 14 chapters: the CD is missing files, and the documentation is not in-sync with the demo software. The school contacted Course and Course is still trying to figure it out (maybe version 3). I am not a legal expert so I don't know if the procedures are right, but they made sense. The book focus is the process of making the extracted information legal. All the software is either demo or limited version. Majority of the projects uses Drivespy which function uses DOS (Win 9x). Sorry, you are out-of-luck if you don't have Win 9x computer. They have limited version of Forsenics Toolkit that works on XP, but the book only uses on a few projects.

This book does not cover any topic well and gives incorrect advice. I wish I read the comments on earlier edition before purchase:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0619131209/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1592003826/

I had my money refunded. A good book on Amazon for forensics is Harlan Carvey book.

There simply has to be better than this.
The package came without the CD. The text was very limited in useful and relevant material.
I used this text for a very good college course in computer forensics. Fortunately, the instructor was incredible. The text was used very little because it was difficult to navigate and not very relevant to the practical approach to computer forensics. Primarily, it was used as a reference guide for file systems and law.

This book was used for an intermediate forensics course and it was a terrible combination. I don't know if the authors bothered to validate their procedures with the tools, but neither worked well. We spent almost as much time trying to get the tools to work as we did actually performing investigations. Not only that, but the answers to some of the problems were incorrect. Bad choice of textbook for a college course !

I am a complete novice at computer forensics (CF). I am taking a technical college course in CF for which this was the required textbook as I write this. I wrote this review so Amazon would stop pestering me with emails asking me to write this review. I haven't finished the course or the book yet but in the absence of any other reviews maybe my experience will help others.

So far I am through chapter 5. The book seems pretty good except for a couple of minor issues. Many CF software such as Drivespy requires commands entered from the DOS command line. The way the DOS commands are printed in the book it can be hard to tell where spaces are required in a given command, with the result that sometimes we were unable to type the commands correctly, which meant that the commands would not execute. It took us some experimenting to figure out the correct command, since like many computer users, we are not that familiar with DOS anymore.

Also, there is a sample problem in chapter 4 I believe involving processing a disk to recover information supplied by the writers of the book about whether a fictitious employee was operating a business on company time. The information we recovered was supposed to confirm that the employee was doing so, but the information we actually recovered indicated that he was not, so we aren't sure what that was supposed to mean.

My course instructor was very enthusiastic about this book, but she is a novice at instructing CF courses as well. I hope that this helps anyone interested in the book and stops Amazon from sending me those emails. When I finish the course I will try to post a further review.

The last review isn't worth a penny. Take it from a forensics expert, this book explains everything about forensics and includes the tools used and scenerios to follow. Every case in this book is very similiar to the cases that I work on a daily basis. Bought the book for our high tech crimes office and use it as a learning guide. It will take the reader through different scenerios and expect the reader to use tools provided, or easily downloaded. This is the book for anybody interested in learning computer forensics. There is a lot of hands on, which is necessary to be successful in learning forensics.

The book explains in good detail about computer forensics and investigations. I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to look into this field of study.