Rating: 
Summary: These books provide excellent methodologies
Review: These books are great for hackers, administrators, and users. When it comes to security and hacking, they teach everything you need to know about the basics to the advanced. Even though you may already know something of the subjects, you will find out things that will amaze you. These books provide excellent methodologies about hacking and teach how it is more important to understand the way hackers think, then to rely on incomplete security tools. They provide great resources on researching, OS vulnerabilities, network security, internet user security, home pc and network security software, and more.
Rating: 
Summary: A fighting chance
Review: As a vocational educator (in a totally different field) and as a new system's administrator I would give Mr. Chirillo an "A" for educational style and content. Initially the book provides insight into various concepts of network technologies. This includes physical layers, networking layers, communication protocols, subnets, and computer ports needed to understand how the hacker functions. After reviewing the technologies of networking, the author progresses to methods used by hackers to uncover system vulnerabilities and methods of network disruption. Throughout the book are notes providing the author's insights and recommendations for further research. The book also contains a large appendix of reference materials including IP tables, ports and services, common virus, and codes. I really liked the way the author gradually imparts to the reader pertinent information by building on previous chapters. The system administrator with little or no hacking experience now has tools to discover and correct security problems. Mr. Chirillo gives the reader an understanding of the mindset as well as the how's and why's of hacking. This provides a powerful tool in securing the network from intrusions.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Book - but not quite what I 've expected
Review: This is a strange book to review. I'd give a 50% recommendation mostly because some chapters (perhaps half the book) could have been stripped with no real loss. There are some good ones, in the beginning and at the very end, but the ones in the middle simply reprint names and usage of trojan/worm/virus kit software found on the net. Besides not being a complete list is useless since needs to be updated in a daily bases. The good chapters explain you a lot of the protocols and how they interact, common techniques used by intruders. If you do not have any other security/tcp-ip related book you should buy this since it's a good start. If you already have others you can safely skip this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Not all that useful for security professionals
Review: If you are a security professional, then this book is not for you. Its content is too scattered.
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