Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Koziol is great.
Comment: This book is absolutely excellent. One of the best, if not the best security book I have ever read.
As previously stated numerous times, it will require you have Assembly and C knowledge. If you don't know either one the book will move lightning fast and you will probably not have the ability to keep up. If you do know both, you should be able to take the book at a nice and steady speed.
Aside from difficulty, the rumors that it contains syntax errors ARE true. There are a few little errors in places like this (showing a typical off-by-one error to prove that C doesn't check boundries on arrays):
#include
int main() {
int array[5] = {1,2,3,4,5};
printf("%d",array[5];
}
While these errors ARE numerous and slightly annoying, the important thing to understand is that you get the general concepts they are trying to teach you. Anybody can fix the syntax to work correctly but if they don't know the logic behind the syntax it's no different than a car mechanic trying to fix a F-16 jet.
I am willing to overlook the syntax and lexical errors that appear in this book and give it a 5/5. I may be too light, but I think it's an absolutely essential book that everybody should read.
If you find yourself wanting to get a book, whether it be Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering, Rootkits: subverting the Windows kernel, or The Art of Computer Virus Research and Defense, while all excellent books (which I highly recommend you all read if this book interests you), if you have the ability to get The Shellcoders Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes, you should.
Customer Rating:
Summary: One of the best!
Comment: This book is excellent. I highly recommend it for everyone from admins learning about what hackers are trying to do to their network to seasoned exploit writers. The best part of this book is that if gives a very solid foundation to anyone interested in the field. The only negative thing that I can say is that you can see a slight difference in writing style between some of the chapters, but I suppose that is to be expected with so many authors.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Required reading
Comment: If you want to learn how to exploit software, this is is a MUST for your library. An awesome book despite a few errors in the text.
The only issue I have is with the numerous promises of additional resources on the web site that have never materialized.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Be Familiar with C, assembly, and computer architectures
Comment: I love this book, I have been gradually working through it over the last two months. I have been brushing up on C and Assembly as I go so that I can truly understand all the material.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Covers important material -- includes too many errors
Comment: The Shellcoder's Handbook covers important and relevant aspects of exploiting system and program vulnerabilities. The point is made clearly; however, examples and figures include errors that make it very inefficient to experiment with the examples. Considering this current (1st) edition, I'd rather recommend interested readers to have a look at other available documentation (e.g. Smashing the stack for fun and profit). This book does not tell the whole story for new Operating Systems either; for example, Fedora Core 3 comes with several protection mechanisms that must be disabled in order to successfully test some of the less complicated examples. Fazit for readers: this book is a nice read but in its current edition ineffective for hands-on experience. Fazit for editor: eliminate errors and update instructions for testing examples on current operating system releases.
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