This book is exactly what its title says. It is for those who want to identify the many security holes and some of the common fixes. Bob Toxen gives very good references on finding other security tools on the web and in the library.

A useful feature of the book is a discussion of the lastest security software. The danger however is that this will make the book outdated quite fast. for instance, the author talks about ipchains not iptables. Also he misses references to trusty software such as cryptfs (though there is a reference to ppdd).

The book is a must-have as a reference. It would have been more useful if it was available online.

A very good introduction to UNIX and Security. There is valuble information even for experts, however you have to dig for it. In general the book reads like a story book and is very easy to understand. This is a disadvantage sometimes when you just want to refer to something and you have to go through pages and pages of not so useful information.

One of the better books in Security, concentrating on algorithms, rather than stopping at attack descriptions. Very detailed coverage of converntional and public-key encryption. I recommend this book to anyone interested in Security and has some knowledge on algorithms.

This book is a good introduction to script kiddies, programmers who want to know about tools to attack systems and novice system administrators. It is a compendium of most of the attacks known. I did not like the way the attacks are classified according to the operating system rather than based on the bugs involved. For each attack mentioned in the book, they describe the tools needed to carry out the attack, a high level description of the attack strategy using the tools and ways to protect against the attack. However the book fails to explain the flaws in the protocols or programs that allow these attacks. I would recommend this book to someone who doesn't care how an attack works, but is just interested in knowing about various attacks. Definitely not recommended for someone working in this area or someone with basic OS knowlege.