Customer Reviews

Shellcoder's Programming Uncovered (Uncovered series)

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After waiting for this book for many months I was excited to see a package from Amazon earlier today. I knew right away it was this book. Not waisting any time I opened the package and rushed to the table of contents not exactly knowing what to expect, but knowing it's going to be good because it's Kris Kaspersky after all, the man who wrote "Hacker Disasssembling Uncovered". It was very promising for most part. A few things confused me a little bit though... making me look at the cover of the book a couple of times. For example, what does GPRS have to do with shellcode? But I thought, "As long as the other stuff is as good as it sounds I don't mind a few offtopic pages". Unfortunately, not a single chapter managed to deliver on the expectations. There's very little about actual shellcode programming. I saw some basic discussions about what functionality shellcode has along with occasional assembly snippets and that's about it. Chapters are short and provide only a brief introduction into the topics they are suppose to cover. In general, this is very much a beginner's book because if you know anything about writing exploits you know pretty much everything in the book (except the offtopic chapters, which the book has a lot of; e.g., "databases under attack", "sniffing a lan", "attacking bluetooth", a couple of chapters on GPRS, etc). Very disappointing... I don't think it deserves its title. It should have been called "Some stuff about overflows and shellcode along with a whole bunch of unrelated meteral that you'll be left wondering about".

Verdict: If you have money to spend and you don't know what shellcode is, you won't waste your money when you buy this book. Otherwise buy "The Art of Computer Virus Research and Defense". It's not about shellcode programming, but it's definitely much more useful. If you really want to know about shellcode programming get "The Shellcoders's Handbook".