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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Browse at the bookstore, but do not buy., January 4, 2001
I am a network security engineer who hoped to find a concise volume on networking and security, suitable for review by my colleagues and students. I was disappointed. The book is haphazard, poorly edited, and written at less than a professional level. While the chapter on choosing an ISP is helpful, it can't carry the whole volume. I dislike writing 2-star reviews, but my overall goal is to give straight advice to Amazon.com customers and technical security professionals.First, the authors and their editors should realize "thus," "therefore," and "rather" are not conjunctions, and "however" as used in the text isn't a conjunction either. The frequent joining of sentences by these adverbs annoyed me. I expected more from the co-author with a degree in English literature. Second, attempts to sound cute fall flat. Page 21 says "The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is one of the most popular protocols in the TCP/IP stack. But you don't need us to tell you that." Indeed, why bother writing it in a "Concise Guide"? Third, the book lacked enough diagrams to illustrated key points, and some figures weren't clear. Where in figure 2.10 are we told that "8 | 7 | 6 etc..." mean bits? Beyond syntax and style, I found technical errors. In chapter 3 the authors repeatedly misname a SYN flood as a "TCP SYN scan." They mislabel their three-way handshake figure, and don't understand the true victim of the DoS in figure 3.2. On page 71 they say "The intruder gains access to your system usually by installing a series of Trojan-horse programs collectively known as a root kit... The Trojan programs allow normally untraceable access, so there is not as much sanitizing that the intruder must do to cover his tracks." This is false or at least muddled. A root kit is known in the industry as a set of post-compromise tools used to clean logs, Trojanize binaries, and open alternate back doors. A root kit is not traditionally used to gain initial access, although "one-stop-shopping" tools might include cradle-to-grave exploitation. On the positive side, the chapter on choosing an ISP was informative. I enjoyed seeing various WAN technologies discussed together, too. Unfortunately, this could not compensate for the confused and hurried material found elsewhere. I recommending avoiding this book until stronger literary and technical editors publish a second edition.
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