Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: It does help me a lot
Comment: This book really take me thro' for what I need to know in order to support the deployed SFTP solution. Now, I have clear idea in selecting options while building the package.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: About what you would expect
Comment: I am a consultant and used this book on an integration project. There is not much special about this book. It is relatively difficult to find information on a topic as the author tries to integrate the information on ssh1, ssh2 and open ssh and it is sometimes not clear what something applies to or not. Not much else available and at least one revision has already been issued.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Stick to the man page
Comment: This is one of those O'Reilly books that actually makes you stupider than you were before having read it.
Face it, nobody reads books like this cover-to-cover. We might go through the introduction and the first few chapters, but after that we jump around to the parts we want to know about right now. The authors of this book have done everything in their power to make sure that this is not possible. In my case, I was interested in learning more about the various options involved in port forwarding, so I skipped ahead to chapter 9, which is dedicated to the subject. Unfortunately for me, I was completely lost, not because I had no grasp of the concepts involved, but because of the horrible writing, illustration and page layout choices.
First off, the authors seem to be big fans of mathematics, as they frequently contract long, complex statements into single letters they have chosen arbitrarily. Now this might not be a big problem when you're talking about getting from "computer A" to "computer B", but when providing examples of commands one is to enter into a terminal that look like this:
ssh -L2001:S:143 S
or even better yet:
ssh -g -L P:S:W B
It gets pointlessly confusing. If you don't already know what you're doing, you'll probably think that those capital letters are arguments you should type into your terminal rather than the names of computers and ports you're supposed to insert yourself, especially when there are absolutely NO full, syntactically correct examples of these commands given anywhere in the book. It's like it would kill them to type out a single working example. I would suggest the possibility that they might suffer from severe carpal tunnel syndrome as an explanation for this terseness were it not for the amazing displays of verbosity these very same authors seem to be capable of whenever another opportunity to shamelessly plug Tectia presents itself. If I didn't know better I'd think there was a product placement deal at work here.
On top of all of this, the illustrations are just awful. Not only are they frequently as ambiguous as the command line examples they are meant to illustrate, but they are also labeled inconsistently, and worst of all, are often placed 2-3 pages away from the text they are meant to compliment. You can easily waste hours of time flipping back and forth between lines like "ssh -g -L P:S:W B" and the pictures of poorly drawn boxes which defy all laws of perspective and clouds with arrows pointing all over the place that are meant to clarify them somehow.
I'm sure the authors know a lot more about SSH than I ever will, but they cannot write, and I wish O'Reilly's editors would start enforcing some kind of quality control in their publications. There are free tutorials out there that are better than this tripe, and many of them are written by 11 year olds.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Makes sense of the obscure land of SSH
Comment: For something that should be simple SSH is anything but a walk in the park. This is compounded by the fact that the documentation for SSH just blows. This book, however, does everything but blow. In classic O'Reilly fashion the author decomposes the topic and covers it effectively from almost every angle with excellent writing and superb graphics. This is a great book for anyone who uses SSH, or who is having issues with it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: why you should use ssh
Comment: [A review of the 2nd EDITION 2005.]
In an earlier, more trusting Internet, rlogin, ftp and telnet were widely used for remote access. But the increase in malware sniffing of these plaintext channels has led to ssh largely supplanting them. The book explains why you as a user should prefer ssh. It greatly helps to guard your account and its password. No small matter if this account has sensitive data. Actually, if you are also a sysadmin, you may want to consider restricting secure remote access to ssh.
The book deals with the broad outline of the cryptographic underpinnings. But it does not require you to understand any of the formal maths. (Whew!) As a practical matter, the bulk of the text is taken up with the myriad ways that ssh implementations can be used. Shows the crucial role played by ssh. Possibly the hardest part concerns key management. Which is often the bane of any cryptosystem. So you should not regard this as a particular failing of ssh.
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