Customer Reviews

Network Security: A Beginner's Guide

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Books for beginners fall into two categories: the Dummies or Idiot's Guide books that treat the reader like an imbecile, and those that treat novices as mature and intelligent. Network Security: A Beginner's Guide falls into the second category. The reader comes away with a lucid understanding of the fundamentals of network security without being talked down to.

Information security managers have a rough job. Although more money is being spent on information systems security, systems are increasingly complex, and complex systems are difficult to protect. This book is a good starting point for network managers and system administrators who need clear instruction on how to create and run a secure technology infrastructure.

As security of information systems increases in importance, it is becoming critical for everyone in the IT department to understand how all the components work. While not every staff member or manager needs to know how to install and configure firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and e-mail filters, they must nonetheless understand the significance of such technologies. This book covers those issues along with other significant information.

Besides security products, the book gets into the nitty-gritty of security architectures, hacking, encryption, and operating systems. It includes a set of blueprints that describe key systems for designing an effective security architecture. This review of mine originally appeared at ...

The book concludes with the question of whether UNIX or Windows NT is more secure, a topic that has been fodder for countless debates. Avoiding a discussion of the minutiae of each operating system, the author astutely notes that the answer to the question is not within the operating system itself but rather with the system administrator. That's good counsel from a good book.

I originally bought the book because it was less than 10 bucks, and I wanted a good overview of network security. The book is written fairly well, but it's main focus is security policy and legal issues with a general overview of some network security technology.
I have been in IT for around 6 years now, the last 2 I spent working on Military/DoD networks, so I already have a sound networking background. This book's intended audience seems to be aimed more toward the executive/management type who does not have much technical experience. I believe a better title for this book would have been "Network Security Policy Making: A Beginners Guide". If you security needs are more for creating sound policy & procedures this is a good for you, the more technical minded should seek elsewhere.

I am pretty new to the network security world. This book is a great guide to the very basic ways of securing a network. My main goal was to find out more about securing my network from outside attackers, and this book hit the nail on the head. I highly recommend it to beginners and intermediate network professional.

Hi,
I am working in IT Securiy field , and was a fan of this book's first edition. He also did a great job for second edition.

I was about to conduct a internal training class (Basic ITSec.) for my IT colleagues here and use his 2nd edition as primary source material.

I have found no typo nor technical error in this book and the only negative point for me is that the "Hacker Techniques" & "Type of attack " chapters comes too early as they should appear after CIAA was disscused. Maybe this is the author's style to make this book more colorful but I personally think make learning experience in ITSEc. a little deviate.

Still , this book is worth buying.

Excellent book at an introductory level. Not much technical. But gives a brief overview of most of the security terminologies . This is perhaps one of the best books to start with.
- Anand

Also great reference book. It is not for someone who has already had a course in network security (except as a reference book) as it is a pretty low level book. It is easy to read and follow.