great book recommendation

conceited

I bought this book the other day, and I think it's one of the best computer security books I've ever come across.
Has anyone else read it?
http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-Art-Exploitation-Jon-Erickson/dp/1593271441/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220368473&sr=1-7

AARRRGH

I have it, but I didn't really like it. That could be me though. I prefer *everything* to be explained - I want to understand every single part of whatever I am trying to implement or use

conceited

Well that everything slows me down no matter what I do.Learning assembly and then flip flops,takes awhile if you know what I mean.Then learning electronics and magnetic fields, why the ram is a certain distance from the cpu, and how fast electrons move etc, it's kinda a curse wouldn't you say?

I thought he went fairly deep when he was explaining things.Maybe he didn't want to go to deep?I dunno.

What alternative book would you recommend yourself?

JimmyCrackCorn!

I liked this one

http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Security-Tools-Exploits-Foster/dp/1597499978/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220541645&sr=1-1

Will put that on my reading list though. Thanks

Martyr

this book is good, but its only about computer viruses.

i haven't read any of those books but from now on before buying a book based on reviews, i try get an electronic copy and read through that first to see if its useful for me.

Alot of the content is usually copy/paste from existing material of a much higher quality, and already available online for free.

for example the book on building rootkits could have been written as a PDF and bundled with source code of regmon/filemon by Mark Russinovich as it is essentially just a copy/paste job with notes on how to construct a badly written rootkit from those 2 programs.

another thing with the shellcoding books, the authors insist on using AT&T syntax which..if you've programmed x86 assembly for long enough, you'll NEVER touch..thats why we have NASM.

alot of stuff out there is already free to download, e-zines are usually good place to look, but of course this has wayned in last 4 years or more possibly due to commercialisation of computer security and the criminalisation of some really talented/now forgotten, researchers..

_CreeD_

Not an exploit source but still an excellent read on basic security and some mid level cryptology...and it's free (well the first edition anyway): http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html "Security Engineering - A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems" by Ross Anderson (He created Serpent).