Two More Pre-Reviews

Two new books arrived at TaoSecurity world headquarters this week to be added to my reading queue. The first is Silence on the Wire by Michal Zalewski. This looks like a creative and unconventional look at digital security, although the book's subtitle is "A Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks." Michal was kind enough to email me to ask if I would review his book. You may recognize Michal for some of his work, like the P0f tool or his really cool TCP sequence number analysis.

The second book is Python Cookbook, 2nd Ed by Alex Martelli, Anna Ravenscroft, and David Ascher. This new edition covers Python 2.3 and 2.4. I consider this book another piece of my Python education program, which I plan to start in the next month or so. This book is helpful because it presents over 300 problems, code solutions, and discussions of those problems. Assuming the code is good, Python programmers will not have to reinvent the wheel if a problem they face is similar to one in the book. I think this sort of "solid code reuse plan" makes a lot of sense.

If you're wondering why you haven't see any recent book reviews, I'm working my way through the excellent The Internet and Its Protocols by Adrian Farrel. It's an 800 page protocol text, so it's taking a while. I also read everything I review, unlike some of the other reviewers with higher Amazon rankings!