Computing Internet Books

this book is a pretty typical dummies guide. i haven't taken the test yet so i can't say much. it's outdated now but since the new versions of server+ preparation guides are not yet available this is probably as good a test preparation book as you can get. i used the dummies guide for a+ certification and it was okay. lots of overlap between the a+ guide and the server+ guide--good luck to you, and good luck to me.

Best used as a starter or final prep but needs somthing more heavyweight for the exam.

Not a bad book but it just skims the surface on the topics present on the exam. Anybody who is going to take the Server+ exam make sure you get one of the larger study guides as well to get a more in-depth view of the topics that are on the exam. This book is more like an overview.

Ron Gilster and Mike Glencross have come up with an easy to read book with a little humor spread throughout with that Dummies aplomb. I found myself reading quickly through this book. This is not as meaty as some of the other Server+ books, but it does touch on all the exam objectives. My suggestion would be to use this book in conjunction with one of the other thicker books such as the Server+ Bible for more in-depth look for certain topics. The RAID and SCSI chapters were good and I also enjoyed the chapter review questions. However, the included CD with the Dummies book has many identical questions as the Server+ Bible CD and this may be due to them being published by the Hungry Minds.

I will also add that I emailed BOTH Ron Gilster AND the dummies press asking if any erratta was posted, and as of today, 2 months later, I have received NO REPLY from either party. This is most unfortunate considering that the book is well written, catchy, and makes a very dry subject a lot more interesting. So shame on the technical editors.

I finally got a chance to use this book. I hadn't had time to really sit and play with it. My friend called and needed me to come over and help set up Ipods for all three children. I grabbed the book thinking it may help. And yes it did. I would have been lost without it. It made things so simple and if I had a question it had the answer. I was so excited I came home and used the book to organize my ipods better. A must have for any ipod owner.

This book is a good book for folks with thier first iPod opened before them on up to intermediate users who already know all the basic functions. All folks in these groups will learn useful stuff about many aspects of the iPod and iTunes.

It contains some basic "hacks" and such but states most don't work with the latest iPods (as of the published date). The hacks are pretty basic things like modifying the on-screen interface and such so not really what an advanced user would be looking for.

It seems to be a fair book. I didn't like the fact that it was in black and white only. I also thought it was a little outdated.

iPodpedia was a Christmas gift I bought for my brother who purchased his iPod in 2006. I bought myself an iPod 80GB Classic and my six-year-old son a iPod Shuffle for Christmas this year and was confident that my brother would share his iPod knowledge with me. Needless to say, the iPodpedia has become the CHRISTMAS GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING.

My brother has been reading it like a book and shares all the great tips and tidbits he has found in the well-written book by Michael Miller. I'll receive phone calls from brother so excited, "Hey, did you know that your iPod can do this?"

I'm not certain, but I may have to buy another copy just for myself. What if I can't reach my brother one day and I have a question?

I purchased this book for my Dad because he is always asking me questions about his Ipod. I learned more by reading three pages from the chapter labeled secrets then all of the lookups I have done on my own. I was so impressed with the book that I purchased one for myself. If you own an Ipod or know someone that does, you must purchase this book.

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like the Hacking Exposed series was in an extended hiatus. It has emerged with a vengeance. Hacking Exposed - Wireless is just one of a series of new Hacking Exposed books and there are more to come throughout the coming months.

While it has been a while since there were new Hacking Exposed books, it seems like it has been even longer since we have had a new book on wireless network security. A topic as rapidly changing and evolving as wireless network technology and security needs updates and new contributions frequently to keep readers informed.

Cache and Liu do a respectable job of bringing the latest and greatest wireless attacks and security measures to the reader. The first chunk of the book- the first 3 chapters- are dedicated to providing a sort of overview of wireless technology and the history or evolution of network communication via RF, but then the book gets down to business.

The authors discuss how to enumerate and identify targets, and how to attack wireless networks, including ways to attack networks 'protected' with WPA encryption. Further into the book, they also provide coverage of wireless security in public hotspots, and a chapter on Bluetooth security.

Hacking Exposed - Wireless covers how attackers use various tools such as Kismet or Airopeek to identify vulnerable wireless networks, and how the Metasploit 3.0 Framework can be used to exploit and attack wireless networks. It also discusses packet injection and DoS (denial-of-service attacks).

Overall, I think the book covers the information well. It provides a good amount of detail about the flaws and weaknesses of wireless networking that can be exploited, and also instructs the reader on security countermeasures to defend against such attacks. Being the most current available also makes this book a must read.

When I read and reviewed Wi-Foo: The Secrets of Wireless Hacking three years ago, I was really impressed. Wi-Foo is obviously showing its age now, but a second edition is in the works. I was excited to see Hacking Exposed: Wireless (HE:W), green cover and all, because I hoped it would be just as good as Wi-Foo but covering newer topics. Overall I think the next Wi-Foo will be better than HE:W, but HE:W is currently the most up-to-date book on wireless security available.

Most readers can avoid the first 60 pages or so of HE:W. It seems the different authors wrote the first two chapters, and I doubt most of us need radio, cryptography, and other history lessons. This is supposed to be a Hacking Exposed book, which should mean introducing technologies with a security spin and hands-on exercises from the first page onward. If you want to really understand wireless, read 802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Ed by Matthew S Gast, which was my 2006 book of the year.

HE:W begins to be interesting on p 61 with a discussion of "802.11 Packet Types." From this point forward the authors share many unique insights which are either obscure or not well covered elsewhere. I appreciated reading items like the fact that all access points on a channel should honor frames with CTS bits set -- even if the APs belong to different enterprises. Chapter 6 offered great insights on wireless zero configuration in Windows. The authors also demonstrate a powerful ability to explain the workings of various complex security technologies and their weaknesses, e.g., PEAP certificate failure attacks in chapter 7. Chapter 10 offered a story similar to that found in Syngress' Stealing the Network series, where an obsessed hacker exploits Bluetooth on a woman's Mac laptop.

I recommend reading HE:W if you want a modern treatment of wireless security issues. The authors cover many aspects of up-to-date features and weaknesses of wireless technologies, although the focus is mostly 802.11. While I liked the story in chapter 10, I would have also enjoyed reading more traditional HE coverage of Bluetooth outside the story format. Overall I think Wi-Foo II (arriving in November) will be the book to beat. If you can't wait that long, I recommend reading HE:W.

I have a ton of those red covered books on the book shelf. The Hacking Exposed series has been good to me and good to every person trying to learn security. So, I was excited to have my new green covered Hacking Exposed Wireless book show up at the house so I could learn some wireless hacking. The first 60 pages or so of background technical content is interesting but not totally necessary to get going with the topic. I do realize to be a good "hacker" you need to understand the technology, but the other HE's have been able to balance giving us the background and still able to use the tools for some hacking action.

I felt that once we finally got into the technical content (starts with 802.11 discovery) that they talked around topics but really didn't cover how to actually "do" anything. There isn't much to running kismet after configuring the one or two lines of the conf file. Then its a simple #kismet or $sudo kismet and it runs. Netstumbler is even easier since you have GUI to help you out and its on Windows and same same with KisMAC on OS X.

The cracking WEP section starts out with saying use an old kernel and the madwifi-old drivers. That may have been great advice when the book was published but it is certainly not useful for the average user today especially since it appears the bugs have been worked out of the new madwifi driver and aircrack-ng. (We do have to take into account that I read the book in Sep 07 and it was published in March 07). The section on using aircrack to break WEP on linux on pages 180-182 was decent but certainly not anything you cant get on the aircrack-ng homepage. A little more content on how we do fake authentication attempts and then why and how we have aireplay send our ARP packets would have been nice. The current version of aireplay when you run that capture makes you pick which capture we want to use, since they don't cover what packet to use it may be difficult for the person following along. The shell of the instructions are there, but the details are missing.
The opportunity to shine by talking about the Fragmentation and ChopChop attacks is devoid of actually using aircrack-ng or other tools to launch the attacks, so it falls short.

The Hacking Hotspots section (CH 9) looked to be the redeeming section at first glance but much like the WEP cracking section is lacking any useful screenshots or how to use any of the tools they mention. The most frustrating part was the author telling us how they have a slick SSH set up to use public hotspots but provides no information on how to set up one of our own. The tunneling using ozymanDNS attack gives no useful information on how to use the tool, the billing attacks section gives no useful information either. While I understand its illegal to steal wifi, if you aren't going to actually cover it, don't bother talking all around it. The client attack section consisted of installing nmap and nessus and running it against clients on the LAN. That section was the perfect set up to really cover KARMA in-depth, sadly a missed opportunity.

The bluetooth section (CH 10) that looks to be written by Kevin Finisterre was excellent and met the high standards previous HE books set. He walks us through a fictional scenario with real code and explains how we can use the code to exploit bluetooth vulnerabilities on OSX and gives us the link to the code :-)

Overall I was disappointed in the book which is unfortunate because the authors are known to be very knowledgeable and skilled people in the security industry. It can be a good reference on wifi background and hardware if you need one but it falls a bit short IMO of being as useful as some of the other HE titles.

Recomemnded as

- The only read, for people wanting to have an understanding of what UML really is. For example, managers who need to grasp the benefit of UML and assess the difficulty of it's use.
- The first read, for people wanting to actually use and implement UML.

UML is not exactly an easy subject to understand and I don't think this book can "demystify" UML for any beginner.
My biggest complain about this book is that it could be less verbose and more clear.
But it's definitely worth reading.

Bravo! Bravo! Prometheus has brought UML fire to the forsaken and dank world of UML neophytes. UML Inherently lends itself as an acutely idiomatic abstraction on the science of software engineering, and could be a rather knotty topic to elucidate. Paul has created a dazzling masterpiece for those of us who have been frazzled and bedazzled by attempts to understand the language to any practicable extent. His prose is sufficiently balanced with literary invites and his techno jargon is tamed enough to foster a pleasant reading experience. Now that I have exposed the relevance of this book to me, I will offer a few words on how it might benefit you.

With a desire for more than an a cursory excursion into the study of UML, you might ask yourself these questions: how can this enhance my career? or how can I employ this newfound knowledge? Well, it will prepare you to overshadow the initial daunting feeling you might experience on your first encounter with a UML CASE tool; this type of software engineering tool could enable you to become very productive in a respectable time span, but this feat is achieved only after you have had a profound understanding of the robust and industry-proven design methodology that is inherent in UML--this book will bolster your confidence for that mission.

Again, Bravo!

I tried reading two other UML books before I found Paul's. After the first two I didn't even know what I had read. I almost gave up but work kind of made me keep trying. When I found Paul's book, everything started to make sense. Not only did I seem to be able to actually use the diagrams in useful ways but his book enhanced my understanding of object oriented programming, which was a bonus.

I highly recommend this to anyone who has been baffled by UML in the past. It's the first time I have seen how really valuable the whole process is. Now I'm hooked. Also, his book keeps me awake and is well thumbed, the other books would make me nod off.

The authors easy going style makes this an easy read. Kimmel succeeds in turning a tedious and technical subject into a tolerable learning experience. If you're new to UML, this is the book to start with.

Once in a while an author appears who stands head and shoulders above most other technical authors. Kevin Wallace is definitely one of that rare breed of authors who has the unique ability to impart substantial technical information in a really accessible manner. I found this book incredibly easy to read, having attempted reading some other books on VOIP and not getting past the 2nd Chapter with most of them.
Even though the book focuses mainly on Cisco's VOIP implementation, the information is put across in such a way that you get a good understanding of VOIP principles in general. The chapter in this book on QOS alone is worth getting the book for, as it explains Cisco QOS in a most lucid and user-friendly way. His anologies are excellent and his occastional injection of humour also makes reading the book a most pleasurable and useful learning experience. If you are a newbie to VOIP, then I can't think of a better book to get your hands on. Highly recommended!

Very Good! Easy reading for anyone. If you have no experience with VoIP this is the book for you. I found it also helped with my CCNA study. Anybody who wants to learn VoIP should begin by reading this book first.

For those who are intending to go for Cisco Certified Voice Professional but don't have much knowledge about Voice, this book would be an excellent introduction to general Cisco Voice Networking.

It introduces you to many expects of voice from ground up without giving too many technical details to the point you can get bored. For voice newbies, this book would be a great companion.

Kevin Wallace's VOICE OVER IP FIRST-STEP joins others in the 'first step' series in providing a basic introduction to IP telephony services. You don't need to be a programmer or even a computer whiz to understand the basics as presented here: whether you're a home user interested in lowering a monthly phone bill or a business person using data networks, chapters provide real-world applications using case studies throughout, no prior IP telephony experience is required to learn the basics here. And networking instructor Kevin Wallace knows how to cover them easily.

The title of this review pretty much summarizes my thoughts about the book. This is an excellent, quick-to-read book that provides all the basic info about VoIP, focusing on Cisco's offerings.

Although I read the book over a couple of days, I believe I put in less than 3 hours to read the entire book cover to cover (over all those days).

The book is very simple to read. The book is ideal for network administrators as well as system/equipment design engineers to quickly introduce themselves to VoIP. The book is also good to understand all the varied VoIP offerings from Cisco and how stuff plugs together to provide an integrated service.

The last chapter of the book goes beyond vanilla-VoIP, by discussing (in brief) Cisco's IPCC and other interesting offerings.

Great book! Read it to quickly and easily understand the fundamentals of VoIP as well Cisco's VoIP equipment.

Hope you will publish the contents of the Book with some workarrounds as we can be confident in ordering the book.

I'd recommend this book to any Solaris Systems Administrator/Benchmark Engineer who deals with Performance Monitoring and tuning at this job. The book goes in great technical detail about the various parameters. It is a little old (was published in 1994 when Solaris was still in 2.3) but it helps in understanding Solaris internals from a systems professional standpoint.

Brings the reader upto speed as to the issues which could affect sun systems and networks. This is a murky area and throws light on how a admin can look at each issue judicously and eliminate them one by one and get to the root cause of the problem.

For all the Sun gurus, veterans and newbies: this is for you. As a must-have in one's library, it'll be one of your most worn out references in your serious IT career. It is practical and very illustrative in its approach to solving sample problems.

Great book. I can't say enough good things about Adrian's work. This book has lots of useful information on improving performance on Solaris machines. Really good information on tuning the tcp/ip stack, however, I wish there had been more of it. If you're looking to tune Solaris, this one is a must have.

there's a lot of mistakes in the book, if you already know a little bit of programming you can probably see the errors but for people who does not know anything it will be very difficult to understand cuz it won't work with so many mistakes, I think the author need to check the book again and correct them.

This book is awesome! I already knew some Java, but it really taught me how to make GUIS and games. A must have book!

What I really like about Programming Video Games for the Evil Genius is that it taught me Java by building video games. I really liked doing the projects from scratch and can't believe I made these games work! Very cool.

The book goes one line of code at a time with illustrations. It starts simple and gets more intense. But as long as you take your time it works perfectly. Every time I thought there was a mistake in the book I went over it again I figured out it was mine!

I've been programming for over a year and I haven't found a better book to learn Java from.

Awesome and outstanding! I hope there's a volume 2.

What this book is and isn't is a very simple story. This book is a basic introduction to programming video games in Java. This book is not a book that is going to teach you everything about Java. Despite the fact that the cover says it has 53 gaming projects, you will actually be making 12 different games through the course of the book. The book gives you all of the code and brief information on what you are doing, and it is great because you can start making games with little frustration.

How to use this book: If you already know some Java, but you want to get into game programming, you can just pick up the book as a standalone tool. The descriptions are simple enough that you can figure out what you are actually doing. If you want to learn Java and Java game programming, do not ONLY use this book. However, I wanted to learn both, so I picked up this book along with a "learn Java" book, which is a deadly combo! This book has been great for helping me visualize how the code can look for a game, see the relevance to what I was learning in my "learn Java" book, and have a little fun with programming. I switch back and forth because my "learn Java" book explains in detail what the heck I'm doing, while Game Programming for the Evil Genius keeps me interested in learning Java. Also, if you want to create games yourself, but couldn't give a hoot about learning the code behind the game, this book may be for you (though I don't quite understand you!). With this book and limited Java knowledge, you can create these games, monkey with them a little bit, and pretend like you've accomplished something!

Side comments: Not all of the code in the book is completely accurate (as is always the case with programming books). However, if you can't figure out what is wrong with your program, you can always download a working program from the book's website and compare the code. Also, I can't stand NetBeans. The book suggests you use NetBeans (which some people really like), but I used Eclipse SDK, which is also free (www.eclipse.com). Use whatever makes sense for you.

Closing remarks: This is a great book to have some fun with Java programming. You are NOT going to create the next Halo or some complicated game, but you will learn some Java game programming essentials. If you use this book in the right way (detailed above), you won't regret your decision. Also, this book is for anyone interested in learning Java game programing, no matter your age group. It would be great for teens, and anyone older (I'm in my mid twenties). Sound like a salespitch? Maybe. But I'm glad I stumbled across this book and the good reviews I found!

This is a great book if you know what you are getting - a text that teaches you the basics of Java in parallel with simple game programming. In that sense it is somewhat mislabeled. This is great for high schoolers and up who are interested in both subjects, and is particularly good for people who don't have the patience to go through Core Java(TM), Volume I--Fundamentals (8th Edition) (Sun Core Series), which is the best book on Java programming on the market, in my opinion. The games are pretty simple, so you won't get bored with the details, but there is enough meat here that you will learn something. However, don't expect to get excited by the results of the simple games that you write either. When you're through, you'll have some idea of how to think like a game programmer and have a basic understanding of Java. Once you do understand Core Java and this book, you might want to check out Killer Game Programming in Java, which is the best book out there on game programming specifically in the Java language, even three years after it was published.