Bonus points to the kindle edition for retaining a very good reproduction of the actual textbook. My favorite and most frustrating page of the text is page EM1, which instructs me to use a coin (but not a knife!) on my iPad to scratch off and reveal the student access code to the premium online content. Well sheesh, no matter how hard I scratched, no code! And now I have an appointment with the Genius Bar to deal with the ghastly crevices now pockmarking my iPad.
Quite frankly, the price for a kindle edition ($84 for me at the time of my purchase, a minor discount from the new purchase price, but nearly twice as much as the rental version) is a terrible bang for your buck. You cannot resell your copy, and you do not have access to the premium online content. Oh wow you say, big deal, premium online content, that can't possibly be worth that much. Unfortunately, I won't get a chance to find out, but the table of contents gives a tantalizing taste of what isn't in store for me. Specifically, there are sections on Linux Security, Windows Security, aspects of Number Theory, Standards and Standards-settings organizations, (Pseudo)Random Number Generation, Message Authentication based on Block Ciphers, TCP/IP protocol architecture, Radix64 base conversion, Security Policy-related documents, DNS, and the Base Rate Fallacy. Just lightweight irrelevant stuff that no one would ever *really* need, right?
Blame the idiot writing this review for reading the Amazon marketing at the top of their page for the kindle edition of this textbook indicating that it is a "Print Replica" and thus assuming that he would be enjoying the same benefits (and more!) afforded to those troglodytes still bound to the obsolete cellulose edition. He should have scrolled further down the page to definitively discover that the kindle edition "may not" include website access codes.
Caveat emptor.
