Firewalls: A Complete Guide

Rating:
Summary: Very Badly Written
Review: I do not recommend this book, at all. When reading it, you get the impression that the author spent a week or two researching the subject, and then went on to write this book to make some quick cash. It is full of errors and ambiguities. What's worse, in the section on cryptography, the author has shamelessly copied text from Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography". Save your money.

Rating:
Summary: Below average book.
Review: I think that the author should have spent more time writing quality content. It appears the book was written in a hurry or/and without indepth knowledge of the subject. The author repeats himself needlessly again and again. The captions are non-intuitive and I could not understand after browsing through 75% of the book who is the real audience. The writer is very quick to form very biased and uneducated opinions regarding comparisons and his recommendations.

There is one 7-8 page Perl freeware source code repeated "twice" in the book! The author is too gullible regarding what vendors say and what university research says. I had to band my head against this thick book several times on very childish comments :)

All this makes me believe that the book was written without real industry experience.

I am very skeptical about MCGraw Hill books now. Perhaps I'll wait for something from Microsoft Press..

Rating:
Summary: Not bad!
Review: This is a wonderful book. It is valuable to the newbie as well as an experinced internet security professional! Excellent coverage of popular firewalls, including setup and administration. An added bonus is that the author is a fellow Christian and was bold enough to tell us in the preface and akcnowledgements.

Rating:
Summary: Not that good, there are better guides out there
Review: This is frankly not that good of a book. The book should either be a general description for the novice to understand the general ideas of firewalls, or a book for the firewall person who is creating or managing one. Unfortunately, this book attempts to cover both, and ends up providing little value for either potential class of reader.

The author spends the first half of the book describing IP networks, history, and what IP is used for. It is no different than the hundreds of other books that all start out with this stuff, except there is too much of it, and little of it has anything to do with the specific tasks at hand to the firewall administrator. While this is information that administrators need to know, it is useless to the person who is actively (or will) setting up the firewall, as they already know this stuff in order to understand the concepts they have already demonstrated. For users who do not already understand IP addressing and protocols etc., this book does not provide enough information for them to effectively learn this important information, and certainly not enough to properly install and administrate a firewall and security policy. It is better that they get a book specifically about IP addressing, protocols and networking.

The remainder of the book is about specific installation information for a list of common firewalls. This lacks depth in each, and more and better information can be found from the specific vendor's web sites. The best feature perhaps is the table of contents, which lists each covered product so users can get a quick list of places to look.

Additionally, firewall and VPN technology is changing so fast that the majority of the specific information in this book is or will be out of date very quickly as versions change. I would suggest that "general information readers" could find a better overview book, while "firewall administrator readers" would find a better read from a more specific and in depth book.