[.ca] Network Security: A Hacker's Perspective, (ISBN 1598631632)

Highly Overrated:
I'm not sure what's up with all the great previous reviews. My guess is the writers of those reviews aren't extremely knowledgable in network security. This book is riddled with inaccuracies, ranging from completely and absolutely wrong statements to misleading information. I never got through more than 5 pages without finding another instance of misleading or incorrect information. The author's age - 17 years old - most definitely shows. He comes off as more of a "script kiddie" than anything. He obviously doesn't have the in-depth security, networking, and systems knowledge that a true security expert with a number of years of real world experience would have. On the positive side, it does have some good information, but not valuable nor significant enough to make up for the amount of bad info. I'd look elsewhere - this is definitely not a book I'd recommend.

Good on hacking tactics, not so great on background:
This book does a better job explaining hacking techniques than it does explaining network security in general. That is, if you're interested in learning how to do some hacking, or how to protect yourself from some basic attacks, this book may be worth your while. But I wouldn't recommend it unless you have previous knowledge of, or another source for information on, the principles of network security and secure computing. You might get some wrong ideas. In particular, the background material on how the Internet works, and on how it is managed, is spotty. For example, the author introduces and uses 'classful' IP addresses, though classless routing has been on the books for a decade. CIDR makes the interpretation of IP addresses a little more complicated than the book would lead you believe. Also from the what's-new department, the author refers to RFC 1700 as the authoritative source on port numbers, though for years (9?) an online database has been the place to find out about well-known port numbers. See RFC 3232. The section on associating geographic location with an IP number is rather optimistic. A good reviewer would have caught these and other problems. All my gripes aside, the book has a good deal of information on specific exploits, and that is its greatest strength. The book doesn't purport to be a more than a guide to "help you step into the minds of computer criminals," but it should have been submitted to an experienced technical reviewer. A good editing & reviewing job would have helped challenge the author to make this a more valuable book.

Excellent Buy:
I have read all books written by Ankit and I must say that each time he comes out with a new book, he betters his previous writing. This new book is no exception. Network Security: A Hacker's Perspective is Ankit's best book till now. I have found a lot of useful information in this book. It is loaded with lots and lots of information on how an attacker goes about the process of fingeprinting the target network and how a system administrator can protect his network from such probing attacks. In my opinion (and I am sure most of you will agree with me as well) this book is probably the most comprehensive book on Hacker Profiling and Scanning. I highly recommend this book to all system administratos out there who wish to get inside the minds of an attacker and know what his next move will be.

A must read for any computer security professional:
Whenever there is going to be a new book from ankit fadia there are a lot of expectations.Surely this book has lived upto the expectations of the readers. Morever in this book the encryption and file security part could have been elaborated. The only difficulty in reading this book is that the C code cannot be easily understood by newbies.Overall it's a fantastic job by ankit fadia and hats off to him.

A great read:
...After reading "Network Security......", I found the book to be filled with extremely important bits of knowledge related to security, which one tends to overlook normally. This book is certainly a storehouse of such important aspects of security. However, I was most of all impressed with the author's ability to describe a particular attack or working from several different perspectives. The author has this uncanny ability to notice and identify several facets of the same attack. This helps the readers to better understand concepts. The author is an excellent writer and seems to have a lot of experience in this field and has indeed churned out an AmaZING book!