Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Security Warrior
Comment: This is one of my favorite security books from O'Reilly, primarily for the first four chapters which are dedicated to reverse engineering software. While there are a few texts out there that are dedicated to the subject and go into almost painful detail, this book is great for someone who is new to the skill. The other chapter that I was happy to see was chapter twenty-two which covers forensics and anti-forensics. While the coverage on anti-forensics was a bit light, it was great to actually see it included. I would be very interested to see (perhaps write?) a full book on this from O'Reilly sometime in the future, particularly given some of the attack methods on full disk encryption coming out of Princeton as of late.
Overall, a great tome on security with a good body of solid and applicable information. I'm hoping to see an updated edition.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Technical accuracy escapes them.
Comment: This book contains some okay level of steering, but that's about it. The technical accuracy I see exhibited here can only be rivaled by your grandma explaining Windows system internals. It doesn't end at just the author's confusion of C and C++ (classic "strcpy() and other C++ functions" babble); the very explanation of why a program crashes, or how an attack works, or how variables and buffers get created is flat wrong.
I had to stop reading this in the buffer overflow chapter. Highlights include the flawed interpretation of the error message from when bigmac() returned (it returned to non-mapped memory, the book says it read past the end of a string); the horrible explanation of how buffers work (buffers are not simple variables, and variables do not allocate multiple chunks of memory for themselves as explained); and the incorrect description of the return-to-text attack (returned to existing code, but the book says it's run code you injected onto the stack). After reading a stream of these such inaccuracies, I stopped looking for something that actually came out right.
The buffer overflow chapter can easily be replaced with Hacking: The Art of Exploitation. Read that instead. It's also got better networking and WEP attack explanations.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Essential read for any web-based application developer
Comment: This book is outstanding and an essential read for anyone doing web-based application development.
It is very eye-opening to the current state of web security.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good Overall Coverage and Plenty Technical Details
Comment: Security Warrior has good overall coverage and plenty technical details for people like me who are interested in the technical details.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Weak Information
Comment: This book should be titled "General Security Buzzwords 101 For The High Level User." The information in it just misses the information that one would be looking for in a technical environment.
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