Ben Rothke writes "Zero Day Threat: the Shocking Truth of How Banks and Credit Bureaus Help Cyber Crooks Steal Your Money and Identity is an interesting and eye-opening look at how banks and credit card companies make ID theft and fraud rather elementary. But with all that, this book must be read in the larger context of how today's society deals with, and is often oblivious to, risk. When is comes to risk, American society tolerates tens of thousands of drunk-driving deaths, gives millions in federal tobacco subsidies, and is oblivious about near-epidemics such as heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. With all that, it is doubtful that the myriad horror stories Zero Day Threat details will persuade Congress or the other players to do anything to curtail the problem with identity theft and internet fraud." Keep reading for the rest of Ben's review.
Bottom of The Barrel Book Reviews-Confessions of a Recovering Preppie
An anonymous reader writes "Michael de Mare's, Confessions of a Recovering Preppie, has been sitting on my desk a long time, for good reason. They say you can't always judge a book by it's cover but in this case, the unintentionally embarrassing front is perfect. Confessions is a painfully ordinary collection of college stories. Michael seems to have a different definition for the word preppie than the good people at Webster or I do. Even though the author specializes in cryptography, he seems unable to decipher any social situation, himself or the code to writing a book worth reading. Click below to see how confusing it gets.
Josh Skillings writes "The author, Chad Fowler, draws upon his experiences as a software engineer, a team leader over a group of Indian developers, and as a jazz musician, to describe 52 ways or tips that will help you to become a more valuable employee. These tips are described in two or three pages each, and are usually illustrated by a practical example or story. The tips are well thought-out, well-explained and make sense. Chad draws upon the open source movement as well, highlighting ways that contributing to and learning from open source can improve your career. These tips gave me greater respect and appreciation for the open source movement in general." Read on for the rest of Josh's review.
Chad_Wollenberg writes "Anyone who has used a derivative of Unix over the past 20 years has used Bash, which stands for Borne Again Shell. The geek in all of us makes us want to extend our ability to rule the command line. To truly master a Unix environment, you need to know a shell, and Bash is easily the most popular of them. Any Unix/Linux/BSD administrator knows the power at your fingertips is fully extended by what you can do within the Bash environment, and all of us need the best recipes to get the job done." Keep reading for the rest of Chad's review.
Ben Rothke writes "For those who want to stay current in information security, Stepping Through the InfoSec Program is a great book to read after The Pragmatic CSO: 12 Steps to Being a Security Master. While The Pragmatic CSO provides a first-rate overview of the higher-level steps to being a CSO and building an information security program, Stepping Through the InfoSec Program provides the low-level details and nitty-gritty elements on just how to do that." Keep reading for the rest of Ben's review.
Prostoalex writes "Most companies would call themselves innovative and would claim they're delivering an above-average service to their customers. Yet, their customers opinions might differ. If you drill a company on their innovation practices, they would probably mention two approaches they employ: 1. Their research department meets with target groups, compiles presentations for the upper management, which then occasionally hands those reports over to the development department. 2. Their research or marketing department comes up with competitive matrix of the products available from competition. In a meeting then, executives see that their product is missing a feature, and hence the development department is assigned the task of adding 'an Internet-enabled installer' to the product, since everybody else offers them, thereby creating market expectations." Read on for the rest of Alex's review.
Stoolpigeon writes "Cascading Style Sheets are now the dominant method used to format web pages. Even something as simple as modifying a WordPress blog can involve digging around a bit in CSS. A quick search at Amazon on CSS returns over 7 thousand books in the computer category alone. This book claims to be the ultimate though, and that made me approach it with a bit of skepticism. Sure, it could be a decent reference, but is it truly the ultimate reference? I admit I was curious to see." Read on for the rest of JR's review.
Rsiles writes "Honeynet solutions were seen just as a research technology a couple of years ago. It is not the case anymore. Due to the inherent constraints and limitations of the current and widely deployed intrusion detection solutions, like IDS/IPS and antivirus, it is time to extended our detection arsenal and capabilities with new tools: virtual honeypots. Do not get confused about the book title, specially about the "virtual" term. The main reason to mention virtual honeypots, although the book covers all kind of honeynet/honeypot technologies, is because during the last few years virtualization has been a key element in the deployment of honeynets. It has offered us a significant cost reduction, more flexibility, reusability and multiple benefits. The main drawback of this solution is the detection of virtual environments by some malware specimens." Read below for the rest of Raul's review.
Ben Rothke writes "The Pragmatic CSO: 12 Steps to become a Pragmatic CSO is worth reading for one sentence on page 12 which states: It's not about technology — it's about business. The even better news is that the book is full of insightful ideas like that, on how information should work, and how to make it work in today's large enterprise organizations. One of the mistakes many security professionals make is that they think of security for its own sake, when security is simply meant to support the business. CxO's could care less about encryption key lengths and operating systems. While they don't care about the technical details, the people from information security often mistakenly communicate to them in those terms." Keep reading for the rest of Ben's review.
Chromodromic writes "Apress's newest Django offering, Practical Django Projects by James Bennett, weighs in lightly at 224 pages of actual tutorial content, but trust me, they're dense pages. Filled with pragmatic examples which directly address the kinds of development issues you will encounter when first starting out with Django, this book makes an important addition to the aspiring Django developer's reference shelf. In particular, the book's emphasis on demonstrating best practices while building complete projects does an excellent job of accelerating an understanding of Django's most powerful features — in a realistic, pragmatic setting — and which a developer will be able to leverage in very short order." Read below for the rest of Greg's review.
Michael J. Ross writes "Many Web developers wish to create e-commerce sites that also support collaborative editing of content, community forums, and other features that can increase traffic to the sites. But most shopping cart products do not include those capabilities, or, if such third-party add-ons exist, they may be quite limited in functionality. Similarly, most if not all content management systems (CMSs) lack native e-commerce capabilities. Yet that barrier is being overcome, because a handful of e-commerce modules have been created for the most popular CMSs. Perhaps the most promising pairing, at this time, is Drupal and the e-Commerce module — a combination covered in the book Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce by Michael Peacock." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review.
Cgjherr writes "There are management insights to be learned from Steve Jobs? You're nuts. The only things you can learn from Jobs is how to drive people nuts. Or at least, that's what I thought up until I read 'Inside Steve's Brain.' Turns out, there are things to learn from Steve's obsessive perfectionism. Certainly I wouldn't copy every aspect of Jobs' management style. Doing that will likely get you fired, or at least reprimanded, in most companies. But there is some stuff to be learned from how Jobs designs products and analyses the market, and that's the view that Leander Kahney gives us access to." Keep reading for the rest of Jack's review.
Lamaditx writes "There is a good chance that you have heard about "Web 2.0" — the buzz-word coined by Tim O'Reilly in 2005. You will find several reviews of books about this topic on Slashdot. These cover mainly technical aspects of implementation whereas this book introduces the strategical thinking behind the whole Web 2.0 movement... Web 2.0 is so much more than the technology.' The table of contents is available from O'Reilly, together with a chapter preview. The book does not come with any extras but includes the usual free 45 days access to the book on Safari. When reading a book I usually flip through it quickly to get an impression for it, in this case there are three things which I noted right away." Keep reading for the rest of Adrian's review.
Michael J. Ross writes "For computer programmers who do not have a solid understanding of object-oriented programming (OOP), learning the C# programming language can be rather challenging, even if they have experience with C or C++, which at least would give them a head start over non-C programmers. Any developer in this situation may well want to begin the learning process with a book that aims to teach both OOP and C# in as gentle a manner as possible, with plenty of patient explanations and illustrative diagrams — such as those found in the book Head First C# by Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene." Read below for the rest of Michael's review.
Aeonite writes "Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-playing Games chronicles the rise and fall of the Computer RPG industry, from Akalabeth to Zelda and everything in between. While the bulk of the book is devoted to the genre's "Golden Age" in the late '80s and early '90s, author Matt Barton explores the entire history of CRPGs, from their origins in the mid '70s to the very recent past. While not entirely comprehensive, the book covers not only the major players and award-winners, but also dozens of obscure "also-rans" as well as notable games in related genres." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review.
