Data Books

As described on the cover page, this book is cookbook style so I went through the programs on the CD before reading the chapters. I like this book for two reasons.

First, the book is easy to read. A bunch of equations may not always be helpful to understand a problem. What confuses readers most is how an implementation/program corresponds to those equation(s). This book explains the image processing techniques in a plain language and gives you an hand-on experience with those techniques.

Second, to practice image processing, clicking a button on windows or just calling a built-in function, e.g. process(image), will not be enough. When you go to the directory of programs on the CD, you may find out every details. Each program is relatively independent to each other. You will not be stuck by a function call, which you never know or find. Each program is well commented and can be easily modified and incorporated into your program.

This book is good for those who are new to image processing, because it helps you understand what image processing does. It is also good for an experience practicer, because you can find well-organized stuff to build your own applications. It is a must-have book for your shelf of image processing.

Searching for an easy plug & play solution for simple imaging tasks?
No time for programming & debugging things yourself?
No interest in crawling through literature to figure what & how you should program "the methods that solves all your problems"?

Here's a book that deals with most of the elementary - and most used - approaches in image enhancement and analysis. The CD offers a collection of ready-to-play-with programs, both in C source as in executables.

I appreciated the book set-up: each section describes one single task, describes the problem, gives an example, discusses a solution given in literature, and presents the input / output / options for the C code.
- If you want to know more: get the recommended references.
- If you want to modify the program: why not? (well, perhaps because the code is good enough!)
- If you don't care about the scientific background and/or programming: just plug & play!

I have found this book to be extremely useful as a reference for my class on document image analysis. The book discusses (with software which is a bonus!) a whole bunch of image processing techniques that are very useful.

Students can now find in one place- a reference for techniques such as gabor wavelet analysis, convex hulls, moments, fourier descriptors, thinning, hough transform, and chain coding. This allows me as an instructor of an advanced document recognition course to let the students self-study these image processing techniques while I can focus on the recognition topics.

The authors have done a great job of picking examples from a wide range of applications such as outdoor scenes, fingerprints, and documents. The book is "easy to read" and requires just basics of linear algebra to follow.

I already knew image processing when I bought this book, so I am not sure how it would appear to the novice seeking a textbook on the subject of image processing and analysis, but I imagine it could be somewhat confusing. I always recommend Gonzales and Wood's "Digital Image Processing" for those seeking a clear read on image processing and analysis from the ground up. Where Seul's book comes in is with clear descriptions and working code for many basic - and some not so basic - image processing and image analysis algorithms. The book is also very good at explaining the applications of the various transforms. One of the little things that the author of this book does that authors of other books similar to it don't bother to do is to realize that when you are working in image processing you likely have an image as an input and you want an image as an output. Thus the author has built his code libraries so that they work that way. You are not left with arrays of pixels that you have to figure out how to store and manage. In the end you have a nice functional toolbox of working image processing and analysis subroutines that you can chain together and make just about any type of image transform tool you could think of. I'm mainly interested in image effects, and I know this book has been useful to me. The accompanying CD-ROM contains all of the C source code for the algorithms so that you can port them to another language or tinker with them if you so desire. Highly recommended.

The title of this book corresponds to its content, the tutorial gives an excellent overview of basic key points to those readers who are unfamiliar with the subject (as I was). The book can not be used for rigorous study of even simple things but rather kicks you with essentials that are easy to understand with high-school background. This book, written for non-specialists in "image field", gives them techniques for their practical needs and concentrates exactly on image analysis, not on image processing. If you have no time to go through more complex (and deeper) books, take this one to discover basic principles in short form with no attempt to explain the fundamentals. The authors just put you into the facts, so that is why I would characterize the "Practical Algorithms" book as being "handbook". The good point is that the areas of applicability of these facts are explained, the drawback: you have to go to other books to get more details on image processing roots, e. g., to R. Gonzalez and R. Woods' "Digital Image Processing". I bought both, and use them as good annex to each other. The "Practical Algorithms" has lack of some significant areas, like snake algorithm and image binarization (thresholding) techniques but e.g., the cellular processing is quite well highlighted.
Surprisingly, the CD that comes along with this book gave me almost 80% examples that I was able to recompile instantly, and only several examples have failed, mainly due to image file format issues. The source code is not both elegant and bugless, but it is very transparent and portable and can easily fit, e.g., a 16-bit microcontroller.
Overall, this is good book for fast start. You can get real output and pick up ideas on practical side of image analysis. Just remember, the most book examples came from the medicine world, so they are quite specific and may not be implemented directly in your particular application.

My first edition copy of this book is dog-eared and full of bookmarks. This is an excellent tutorial on installing and using qmail. It includes step-by-step instructions for each task involved in setting up and administering (as well as customizing) qmail. Great text. Highly recommended. You don't need to be a Linux expert to install qmail if you follow this guidebook.

Dave Sill did an excellent job of showing how to setup email server. If you know some Linux commands, you'll have no problem setup your first Linux email server. I personally prefer Dave's Qmail handbook to John Levine's Qmail (I got as well). Levine's Qmail is an great second book.

Best Linux book I ever bought!

Everything you need to know about Qmail from installation and complete configuration. There is no other book.

After a month, and hours of installing and reinstalling FreeBSD and Qmail, I finally got the mail server working right! This was my first attempt at a mail server which I use for my family members and a few friends. There are a few errors in the book in some of the scripts which did cause me many problems. That was a pain. But, even at that, I don't think I would have been able to get Qmail running without this book. It is a great book for a person like me who is always doing something a bit over my head.

I just finished setting up a mail server at home and this book really made it simple. I'm not a novice, so I can't speak to it's ease of use, but the steps were simple, and a bit verbose and repetitive, but overall the book was invaluable.

I also needed DNS and BIND to get everything working just the way I wanted, so I'd buy them both.

Tim

I have over 50+ Oracle books from the last 5 years and have also taken all of the Oracle 8i/9i DBA training courses at Oracle. I have to rank this book even though it covers Oracle 8i it still is applicable, after all 99.99% of customers and companies with Oracle are STILL on Oracle 8i and have not even touched 10G yet I would definitely get this book along with Practical Oracle 8i: Building Efficient Databases by Jonathan Lewis, Oracle One on One by Tom Kyte and Oracle 8i DBA Handbook then you can become a real Oracle guru. No other book covers such a wide range of topics on Oracle in the clear succint method that this author does. Now cant wait for an Oracle 10G title soon.

A very rare book which explains Oracle internals, more practical than academic. Advanced topics like latch contention etc are explained lucidly. This is the only book that explains hashing technique with a simple yet neat example.

This book is not just for those interested in leraning about the way in which an oracle database can be designed for being scalable, but also for those who want to learn about oracle architecture.
If you are about to build your first big oracle based application, the reading of this book will help you saving a great amount of time and money.

Excellent book that highlights the fundamental building blocks of any VLDB from all perspectives. Instead of dwelling on information that is already available in the manuals, it highlights all components for architecting a large system and is a definite read for anybody who wants to understand not only the oracle but all the building blocks that make it possible namely, OS, hardware and storage.

Now a days there are lot of Oracle books which confuses the readers with inaccurate information. But this book gives 100% accurate and pracical information. And James knows about the topics he is talking. Not that just cut and paste from Oracle documentation or some metalink notes.

Great book and I have already recommened to most of my friends.

Secrets of Computer Espionage: by Joel McNamara is a must for any PC user. Staffed with so many examples (with a conversational funny tone) the book does a really good job. The book stresses the vulnerabilities and threats, explains in details the evolution of spy tactics, network eavesdropping and provide countermeasures as well.

It's good to know what's around us and be in the know!

Recommend ****
Guzman, Dror

Judging from the title, Secrets of Computer Espionage: Tactics and Countermeasures would appear to be geared to governments, security agencies, or high-level corporations. In fact, as the author makes clear, anyone with an Internet connection is a potential target of online espionage-even by such "mundane" means as viruses, worms, and phishing attacks-and this book is addressed to that huge audience.

Just who is spying on whom? The author explains that the typical person might be a target of bosses, friends, family members, hackers, and many others. Even people with nothing confidential or of value on their computers risk getting caught up in espionage and other cyber capers. For instance, hackers can use their computers as vehicles for staging attacks or as a location for storing illicit files, such as child pornography. And as more cell phones and PDAs connect to the Internet, the risks multiply.

What may be disturbing to some readers is that every computer device and peripheral provides at least one avenue of attack. The author explains many of these schemes, such as keystroke loggers and cleartext file transfers via file transfer protocol (FTP). In addition, operating-system and application-level vulnerabilities constitute even more ways that systems can be compromised.

Despite the grim picture painted by the author, the book isn't intended to make readers paranoid, but rather to acquaint them with the many risks posed by the Internet. This excellent book shows that someone quite possibly is out to get you, but it provides the tools to protect yourself.

The "Secrets of Computer Espionage" by Joel McNamara unveils what every PC user should know before they hop on to the internet Bandwagon. If you can read this review, then you need to purchase this book. Cyber Crime is the number one precursor to identity theft and the simple thruth is -- Internet Security is YOUR responsibility.

Joel McNamara makes you walk a mile in the bad guys shoes, forcing you to see both sides of the story. You will learn the real threats behind internet worms (such as Sasser) and trojan horses (like MyDoom). Discover why Windows(tm) isn't safe and learn who's after your PII (Personally Identifiable Information).

View the world through the eyes of an internet private eye and see that everything really is an open book, it just depends on where you look. Let Joel be your guide. Buy the ticket, take the ride... then go to www.pcpitbull.com and see what's really inside.

Joel McNamara's book is one of the very, very, few books that I classify as a "Must Read" for anyone involved in business or technology. This book does an amazing job of avoiding the "paranoia for paranoia's sake" tone seen so often in computer security books while still taking the issues seriously and discussing them intellegently.

The conversational tone is fun and often quite funny while not making the user feel talked down to. And Mr. McNamara does an equally great job of explaining very complex topics in way that works for both extremely sophisticated computer technology professionals and non-techies alike. I've brought this book around for side-discussions in the seminars I've given since it came out and my students, ranging from small business owners to 30+ year professional tech veterans in Fortune 50s have learned new and important lessons from it. For a book to address all these audiences is rare. For a book to succeed and be invaluable for all of them is virtually unheard of. This book succeeds amazingly well.

I've not only read the book through in one sitting, I keep referring back to it and it's incredibly useful web site on a regular basis.

Joel, thank you for writing one of the key books of the year!

You and your computer face a dizzying array of security threats, writes tech consultant Joel McNamara. Competitors, cops, crooks and even disgruntled kin would love a peek at your hard drive. But don't hyperventilate just yet. If you calmly analyze the desirability and vulnerability of your secrets, you can figure out how to protect yourself. McNamara's prose is surprisingly clear given the degree of difficulty of his topic, and he offers a number of useful sidebars, charts and examples from inside the tech business to juice up his instructional tome. We suggest this practical book to managers charged with protecting corporate data, and to people who are unsure just how safe their computers are.

I found this book very detailed, especially on Ch3 which will basically take you by the hand and explain slowly how subnetting and subnet masks work. In addition, The author will summarize after all the facts that were presented and use a real-life experience to help you understand. Very good book.

While this book alone will not help you pass the TCP/IP exam, I still recommend it whole-heartedly for understanding the material on the exam. This book provides a truly rich, no-nonsense, brief, but detailed explanation of the subject. I suggest supplementing this book with a practice exam (Transcenders, or Measureup.com). That should be all that you need. One thing for sure is that you WILL understand subnetting by the time you read through this book. It sure beats reading those 700 page door stomps, in my humble opinion.

Study Guide? -I'm not so sure; The book doesn't ha ve a Glossary, or questions at the end of each chapter. For anyone wanting to understand subnetting, the author has devoted no less than 70 pages toward this subject(Chap. 3). The author has a clear and concise writng style, for easy transition from "page to brain". But I will still give it 5 stars!

The title of this book is misleading, you cannot and WILL not pass Exam 70-059 by studing this book alone. That's the bad part...

What you'll get though, is an astonishing detailed, accurate, and REAL world examples of how TCP/IP and Subnetting/Mask truly work. How many books have you read but only to be disappointed by lack of Subnet/Mask explaination?

I personally have read through more than a dozens of them but NONE can really explain TCP/IP, They CLAIM they know -- BUT where are the explaination and notes? Two pages? Get real! None comes EVEN CLOSE to this book. Some of the books just explain the "concepts" rather than any real world knowledge how it actually works.

For the first time in my life, I TRULY understand how TCP/IP, Subnetting, Subnet Masks, and Router all work together, Dave Kinnaman deserves the highest recoginition for his work. You've earned my respect for life. Please keep up the excellent work.

Even though the TCP/IP exam is being retired, this book is a classic that should be republished. (Maybe with a new name --"Everything You Need to Know about TCP/IP".) I used this book while setting up a network with two subnets. It has real-world advice, not just exam-cram factoids. My copy is dog-eared, highlighted, and well-used.

Subnetting is not easy to learn. Read and re-read Chapter 4, "Subnets and Subnetting." It is the heart of this book, and an excellent tutorial. If you're having trouble getting a handle on subnetting, this book is for you.

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.

The detection of honeypots has always been one of the main concerns in the honeynet community, basically because if the attacker can identify them, they are useless. For this reason, one of the chapters is just focused on providing some light, tips, and tricks about what an adversary can really accomplish. In fact, we have not seen lots of real-world incidents where the attacker actively checks the existence of honeynet setups.

I have been working with honeynets during the last 5 years. We founded the Spanish Honeynet Project on 2004, and almost at the same time we became part of The Honeynet Project and released the Scan of the Month 32. The main honeynet/pot book reference till last year was the book published by the Honeynet Project. As this is a rapidly evolving field, definitely it has been replaced by this book, written by two project members.

The first chapter is a very brief introduction to honeynet technologies and basic tools. You can jump through it if you are not new to this field. Then, the book covers the main two honeypots types: high and low interaction. The high interaction section provides details about the tools to virtualize your honeypots: VMware, UML, or more specific solutions, such as Argos. The low interaction section provides details about some the most relevant honeypot types to cover lots of detection scenarios: worms, traditional server attacks, Google Hacking, Web-based attacks, etc. It is a wide overview that will give you lot of ideas for new deployments.

The whole book has been cooked with a how-to mentality , and it explains in detail how to install and configure the different tools and software elements covered. Additionally, it provides guidelines, best practices, and analysis recommendations for each tool based on the authors experience. However, for the how to portions take into account that most of the solutions are Linux-based, and the installation and setup process will vary based on the tool version and the Linux distribution you are using (library dependencies, etc). In any case, the step by step guides are very useful as a general setup reference.

From my perspective, the most valuable part of the book is chapters 4 to 6. The authors, Niels Provos and Throsten Holz, are the lead developer/architect for honeyd (chapter 4 and 5) and strongly related with nephentes (chapter 6), respectively. These two are the most famous and advanced low-interaction server-based honeypot and malware honeypot. They know what they are talking about :), and you cannot find a better reference out there for these two tools. The book is an excellent guide, covering from the design principles and innovative deployment ideas, to all kinds of configuration options and possibilities, including limitations on real-world scenarios. Chapter 6 is complemented with other less popular malware-based honeypots (except for Honeytrap).

The book includes some extra material, covering academic and research hybrid solution, still on their early stages, but that can give you and idea of where these technologies are evolving to and the major challenges we are facing nowadays. This pretty much theoretical content is well balanced with the case studies chapter, where real incidents involving different honeypot types are presented. These are always a fun read and a way of getting experience and learn how to deal with intrusions.

Finally, one of the main expansion areas we are involved today is the creation of new client-based honeypot technologies. This book section (highly recommended) does a great job introducing multiple high and low interaction honeyclients currently available, their benefits and drawbacks (chapter 7). This information is perfectly complemented by the last two chapters, focused on tracking botnets and analyzing malware with sandbox environments. Once a client is compromised, it typically becomes a member of a botnet, and for easy and quick categorization, we start by performing a malware analysis of the specimens. I recommend you to add all this knowledge to your incident handling and response capabilities.

Something I would have liked to see in the book is a section about a fully virtualized honeynet environment, showing how using VMware, you can build up a virtual Honeywall (just slightly mentioned on chapter 2) and different honeypots, creating a complete, cheap, mobile and multi-purpose virtual honeynet infrastructure. Also, we receive multiple questions related to this kind of setup in the Honeynet Project mailing lists, because all the previous whitepapers are obsoleted now. I've been deploying these type of solutions for fun and professionally during the last few years and I strongly recommend you to start using them. You won't be disappointed about how much you can learn of what is going on in your networks and systems, and this book is the best starting point.

If you have any relationship with the intrusion detection, incident handling and forensics, threat analysis, or SOC and CERT security side of things, definitely this book is for you. Go through it and improve your capabilities with easy to deploy virtual honeypot solutions. You just need a (not so new) computer, virtualization software, and some time!

The book is well written and I feel that I will be successful in setting up my first honey pot once I get my network segmented for security purposes.

Excellent, really good, sorry for my bad English, but is EXCELENT BOOK.

Regards

Carlos

I have relatively little to add to the praise that has already been given of this book, but I found it extremely enjoyable. In particular, the chapters on collecting and analyzing malware were quite good, in my mind. I think the book delves a bit too deeply into man page territory with the level of detail provided on the minutia of utilities, but that doesn't detract from the book, as it is very clearly segmented away from loftier topics.

Overall, I found this book to be quite excellent, and very informative and accessible to those new to the arena of Honeypots.

It's fairly difficult to find good books on digital defense. Breaking and entering seems to be more exciting than protecting victims. Thankfully, Niels Provos and Thorsten Holz show that defense can be interesting and innovative too. Their book Virtual Honeypots is your ticket for deploying defensive resources that will provide greater digital situational awareness.

A security technician with some degree of proficiency should be able to read Virtual Honeypots and then implement at least one of the solutions presented. This sounds like a fairly common event, but too often technical books do not provide the detail required to transform theory into practice. Virtual Honeypots offers installation and operational guidance for a variety of deception and analysis systems, primarily for server-oriented technologies. I especially gained a better understanding of Honeyd and Nepenthes, the two applications about which I cared the most.

While I liked the first 2/3 of the book, I have to say I really enjoyed the last four chapters. These covered Detecting Honeypots, Case Studies, Tracking Botnets, and Analyzing Malware with CWSandbox. Of these the final chapter was superb. Ch 12 has probably the clearest explanation of hooking I've read anywhere. I am not a rootkit writer or Windows kernel programmer, but the text was so well written I had zero problems following along.

I gave Virtual Honeypots five stars because it is so unique and well-written, but I do have a few minor issues to mention. First, I was somewhat disappointed by the honeyclients section (ch 8). I was not as confident that I could implement a honeyclient solution after reading the great material on server-oriented honeypots. Perhaps the second edition or a separate book will give greater attention to this area. Second, I found a few small technical items. On p 4, it isn't accurate to say "TCP...[gives] each packet a sequence number." Bytes of application data are numbered, not packets. On p 13 we are told to use a snaplen of 1500 bytes, but this will cut off the last 14 bytes of many Ethernet frames. Try it with ping -s 1472 while sniffing with Tcpdump. As you can see, these minor issues are easily fixed in a future printing and do not justify dropping a star.

If you are at all interested in potentially deceiving intruders, buy and read Virtual Honeypots. You'll learn about more than VMware (QEMU, UML, etc.) as well as numerous open source tools you can download and try for free. I look forward to reading more from these authors -- perhaps a book of true case studies?

I purchased for my wife to better understand iPod and iTunes. She likes it, therefore I'm happy with it.. Nuff said..

I knew absolutely nothing about iTunes or iPods..... This book is excellent - it's helped me sort everything out. It's clear, written in as simple language as you get with anything to do with computers and what I really love is that my screen actually matches the illustrations in the book. I'd recommend it to anyone starting out.

Everything you need to know and more. This should be include with the purchase of an IPOD

The iPod is an intuitive device and most folks need only play with it to use most functions. The same thing is true for iTunes. It's when you have gone beyond the obvious and hit a snag or an annoyance that you find whether a reference is useful or not. This books does well at anticipating "second level" issues and provides good guidance. A good example is"compilations" which affects how you browse and hot music is organized. Through the index, I zeroed right in on how this works and setting it to my preference. I would recommend you start with this book whether an absolute beginner or just in need of a reference.

I am new to the ipod experience. All the kids have had them for sometime. I was confused on all the little details which now seem simple due to this easy to read and understand book. Recommend it to all.

This book is absolutely not a book for beginners, but a great desk reference. A must have for any serious Access developer.

As the word 'Developer' should imply, this book is not for MS Access beginners, but once you qualify yourself as 'intermediate' or better, you will feel right at home. Very little of this book is devoted to boring you with rehashes of stuff in the help file (as most other books seem to do). There is a great deal of depth and insight into areas that apply to everyday usage, complex projects, and solutions to many problems MS tends to ignore version after version.

The writing is excellent and they have a web site devoted to updates, errata and such which is very helpful. Chapters 10, 14 and 15 have had an extremely positive impact on the quality and usability of my projects in MS Access as well as VBA and Visual Basic. Many of the code samples are outstanding and written so that you can just drop them in to your projects with no modifications. Many of them are done so well they seem like natural extensions to MS Access (stuff MS 'should' have included in the 1st place).

Complaints? None. Well, okay, I do have 1 minor complaint. They devoted almost 30 pages to The Office Assistant. IMHO these pages and the Office Assistant itself are a complete waste.

This book and its previous versions are the best money I have ever spent. They continue to save me hundreds of hours while adding reliability and capability to all my projects. Highly recommended!

Not only is this series the absolute best when it comes to MS Access, it is the best technical documentation I've had the pleasure to use since the early days of Vax/VMS. A perfect blend of explanation, examples, syntax, and guidance. A level of art to which all others should aspire (and regrettably too many do not).

I'm comfortable with Access but when it comes to VBA I'm a newbie. This book doesn't only tell you what to do, but explains the why behind it. I have a database that I've put double digit hours (10+) into one problem. I got the book read up on combo boxes, the problem area, and in 30 minutes debugged my code to make them do what they were suppose to do. If I get nothing else out of this book it was worth it for that one issue, but upon further reading I'm learning the why's of Access. The code is still a little foreign but now I'm much more comfortable working in VBA. They use Reddicks naming convention which is different to me, but that's easy to look past. A great book!! Thanks Sybex!

Without a doubt, THE best book on Microsoft Access you will find. Most Access Developers will have several books on the shelf next to their desk gathering dust while they search through Google to resolve their latest dilema. Although I'm a Googler as well, my copy of ADH is frayed and worn...but never dusty. The authors write confidently and authoritatively, yet it seems that they take precautions to avoid intimidating the novice. I've seen reviewers referring to this book as "not for beginners." I was at the beginner-intermediate level when I first thumbed through it at a bookstore. I thought the pricetag was a little too high, but after about ten minutes I had to own it. Since then, it's brought me a long way. Whatever your level, if you really want to learn this stuff you will find great value here.

I really enjoyed this book. It was straight forward, to the point and provided some great best practices as solutions to some common security problems. A major problem with security is management. Too often the people making the important decisions do not understand the information that they are given.

As the authors point out, Managers and technical staff speak different languages and that is the key problem here. Managers that read this book will gain a clear understanding of the problems that the IT staff faces, and IT people that read this book will understand the management side and will know how to speak to non-technical staff.

This book is a perfect introduction to security and related business concerns.

This is a really good introduction to security for non-technical and IT personnel. It covers a lot of subject matter including disaster planning, and writing a security policy. This book is an excellent resource for managers who need a clue. It is written better, more organized and more helpful than "Secrets and Lies" and other similar books. I recommend this book for anyone that needs a good overview of security. You may not be a CISSP after you finish it but you will understand what a CISSP is saying.

This book is a great overview of security and policy development. This is not a technical book, it does not teach you the specifics of any particular OS, or how to configure software. It does ask key questions, and gets you thinking about security programs and business practices. The policy template is an added bonus. I gave this book to my manager to help convince her that we needed to look at security differently and budget for it.

This book is a great starter book on information security! I was wading though my copy grumbling "I know this, this, this...", when it occurred to me that I am not the intended audience.

For some time, one of my friends was asking me for a good book on security for somebody who knows absolutely nothing about it. I gave him "Access Denied" - and now he is hooked. Several weeks has passed by and he is already asking for "Hacking Exposed"...

"Access Denied" covers a wide range of security-related topics. The book is well written, logically organized and have everything to appeal to the beginners in the security field, those curious about modern (if not cutting edge) security topics and those migrating to security from other IT fields.

Anton Chuvakin, Ph.D., GCIA, GCIH is a Senior Security Analyst with a major information security company. His areas of infosec expertise include intrusion detection, UNIX security, forensics, honeypots, etc. In his spare time, he maintains his security portal info-secure.org

This book is a great introduction to security concepts and procedures. I've used it as a resource for college papers and I have used the templates to start a security policy. I recommend it to anyone that needs a well written primer on security.

Being a Final Cut pro I took a class on the other end of the editing world through Avid and the program has a lot of differences compared to Final Cut. The book really helps and is Mac friendly as well. I recommend it.

I bought this book in a rush when I got a job editing on an Avid. I had limited Avid experience, but I am extremely proficient on Final Cut Pro. I used this book to learn some very basic skills in the week before my job started. The book is simple and good for beginners, and only suffers slightly because of this when intermediates try to use the book. Reading the book front to back before ever touching an Avid definitely works. But if you're not a beginner, the order of chapters can be quite frustrating. The few words of wisdom on actual editing technique were unexpected but a nice break from the technical lessons.

I was familiar with editing, but had never used Avid software before. When I installed Avid Express Pro software on my home computer I immediately started a new project. I thought that since I knew editing I would easily figure out the Avid software. Wrong. I muddled through it and finished the project, but it took longer than forever, and I seriously simplified the project because I couldn't figure out many of the functions. This book does a great job of explaining the Avid interface in easy to understand language. The book also included a CD-ROM with practice projects.

There are a lot of reference books out there but this is one that you can tell has been written not by a sales person but by a user of Avid who knows what to say and how to say it in a language that is easy to understand and with examples that can be followed simply.

When I purchased my Avid Express DV software I had zero video editing experience. I knew the software was fairly complex, had a lot of capabilities, and the learning curve would be steep, so I also purchased the Avid turorial DVDs. However, with no editing background, after viewing these DVDs I just wasn't "getting it."

Kauffmann's book was perfect for me. It starts with the fundamentals (video formats, hooking up the hardware and turning the system on, etc.) and goes on from there to cover everything though fine tuning audio and doing color correction.

By reading the book (mostly) though once then using it as a "cookbook" while editing, in just a few days I was up and running and capturing, editing, and fine tuning my videos. Admittedly, Kauffmann does not go into great depth in some areas (which he acknowledges) but for someone who's just getting started this is an excellent book and will get you well on the road. I would highly recommend it to anyone just getting started and trying to learn Avid.