Customer Reviews

Professional Cocoa Application Security (Wrox Professional Guides)

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It takes a different kind of mindset when writing an application to make it "secure". Such as determining even what "secure" means. Securing the data the app uses? Securing a user's credentials? Preventing a privilege escalation? Often times the school of hard experience is the only way to learn.

Graham Lee has been in the application security field for awhile, and has the battle scars to prove it. Having sat next to him at a WWDC keynote, he's also a really nice guy. He's distilled down his hard-won knowledge and packaged it up in nice easily digestible chunks for the rest of us. He takes us from learning what a "threat model" is, what kinds of attacks are important to defend against. We see under-the-hood behaviors of Mac OS X and iOS, and also specific programming interfaces. He lets us know when to use specific calls, and sometimes when it's not a good idea. There's a lot of sample code to enjoy, too.

I wish I had this book *years* ago.

This is a great book. It reads well and it's spot on. I feel like I learned a lot just reading the source code for the sample projects (can you say SSH_Control?). But most of all it is as technically accurate as everything else Graham does. I wouldn't change a thing about the layout, style, tone or technical review. This book is for a true beginner, but then, you wouldn't want it to be. Because of this book, I got two others in the wrox series. They're good as well but not as good as this one, which is very pertinent to what I do.

If you write software you should read this book!