The book is only 85 pages long (if you take out the Appendices and filler material). That alone gets it four out of five stars. Well... not really... but there's a lot to be said for producing a book that will actually get read. You can read the whole thing in one bathroom sitting, assuming you just returned from Mexico. By comparison, similar books like "Pro PHP Security" by Chris Snyder and Michael Southwell (also a very good book) are more along the lines of 500 pages and such books are intended as comprehensive reference books rather than tutorials. You'd have to eat at a restaurant in North Korea to get all the way through the Pro PHP Security book. Seriously though - the criticisms of this book primarily pretain to its lack of detail - but I'd rather actually finish a high level book than have a detailed book sit on my shelf unread.
Chris' book is great. It's chocked full of easy to understand explanations and little five line code fragments to demonstrate what he's explaining. Sure enough, if you read the whole thing, you'll understand the essentials of PHP Security. Hey - perhaps that explains the title?
Do I need this book if my company already uses web scanning security software? Yes - you won't understand the problems that those products identify if you don't understand PHP security basics. If you don't understand reported errors, You'll be tempted to ignore or suppress warnings that you don't understand. Chris' book will give you the knowledge that you need in a few easy to follow pages.
There are a few ommissions. They include:
OMISSION #1: The book should mention somewhere that many of the security vulnerabilities it describes are not unique to PHP - especially big ones like cross-site scripting and SQL injection. While PHP has some vulnerabilities that other languages do not (and vis-versa), Java, C#, Ruby, and all the other server-side languages can also be attacked with cross-site scripting, SQL injection, session spoofing, cookie theft, backdoor URLs, etc., etc.
OMISSION #2: The book would have benefited from the addition of a page of system administration best practices to improve security rather than confining itself only to coding best practices. For example, it's easy for developers to accidentally open security holes by making very small changes to the PHP.ini file. A good best practice is to use the operating system to restrict access to that file in the production environment. Or it would have good to see Chris distill role-based security administration policies, logging, or remote procedure call policies down to just the most important principles. He has a knack for filtering out the noise, and if he had added that additional 86th page, I swear I would have read it too.
OMISSION #3: It's worth mentioning how modular design has a very big impact on the number of vulnerabilities inside an application. This is especially important for PHP, because PHP code is often a little more haphazard than code written in other languages - primarily because of the culture that surrounds PHP but also for a few other reasons (we cover those reasons in the PHP Chapter of our own book on the strengths and weaknesses of various technologies).
Bottom line:
These criticisms are very minor. The book is short, easy-to-read, and filled with information that is absolutely essential to know if you are to responsibly deploy a server-side PHP application. Look at the table of contents. If you're not familiar with those terms, you'd better get the book.
Glenn Hostetler
Web Service and SOA Technologies
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Kate
Security advice that is useful for non-PHP programers too
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