Internet Access Books

This book is a bit out of date, dealing with issues from Snort 1.8 and RedHat 7.3. I think I glanced at it for about 1 hour total. Just put it on the bookshelf next to the Snort Intrusion Detection 2.0 book which was (if u ask me) a complete reference.

The solid ratings and reviews for this book are appropriate. It is well written, informative, and moves at a nice clip. Very helpful considering the modest documentation available on the snort site.

When I first got this book, I had little idea what Snort did, other than being used for intrusion detection. And while I'm not an expert in Snort now that I've finished it, the book is simply a comprehensive step by step guide to using this useful tool. I am not an expert in computer security by any stretch, but I've read enough computer books to know intelligent, useful information when I read it. Although I do not have a big enough box to run Snort, I feel confident that using the author's instructions as a guideline along with some common sense I could get it up and running, which I will be doing in the near future. I particularly liked the fact that the author discussed other add ons and software that are essential or ease using Snort, but are not part of Snort itself.
The book is laid out in a logical, easy to understand manner, and I will definitely using this as my reference once I get a box I can put it on.

This is a very handy book, if only because it presents a lot of Snort documentation in a friendly, easy-to-read format. Is every chapter a joyous literary experience? No. But it beats reading manpages and after a few hours of reading from my monitor my eyes sting.

So the material.... This book introduces Snort, what it is/does, etc, then moves on to how it works. I really enjoyed chapter 3, which looks into all the preprocessors and a brief desciption of Snort's order of operations and modularity.

I would especially recommend chapters 4 and 5 to new Snorters since design issues comprise a huge part of the questions posed to the Snort mailing list, most of which have easy or standard answers. After that, the installation/configuration chapters demonstrate how to get a running setup using RedHat.

I've read a couple complaints in earlier reviews that these instructions don't work and I must say that it is exceedingly difficult to write an installation procedure that incorporates half a dozen different pieces of software, all of which are under seperate development. I actually know about this because I maintain the FreeBSD install guide on the snort site and the instructions that work one week are slightly off the next week. Use the instructions in this book as a guide and you probably won't have much dirty work to figure out on your own.

The rest of the book gets into the nitty-gritty of using Snort and I think it does a pretty good job. This includes tuning signature sets to use less memory/CPU and to generate more reliable alerts. False positives are the bane of the IDS world. If you're new to Snort/IDS then you'll enjoy learning of several great tools like Swatch and Barnyard that this book explores.

Overall I think this book is well worth the 31 clams I coughed up on Amazon.

I teach networking and security courses at a local unversity, and I have been using this book for a portion of the courseware this semester. A significant portion of the course is hands-on, and this book helps my students understand how intrusion detection is used in the real world.

The chapter on creating rules from packet captures is invaluable --- as is the Snort internals chapter. I understand how Snort works, how to deploy it, and most importantly, the pragmatic side of using Snort in the real world.

This is by far the best of the Snort books out right now, the others are either low on detail or are extremely poorly written. The Snort 2.0 book was disappointing. I was expecting it to be the best book, it stuffed with filler chapters, and overly wordy.

I would like to see more details, but otherwise - it is very nice introductory book.

This book details PKI architecture from a vendor-neutral perspective; perfect if you need to understand how PKI fits into your enterprise system design. I disagree with some of the other reviews that claim this book is for managers. The reviewers making these statements might be code hackers who don't care much about the overall technical structure. It is great for system architects. PKI is an infrastructure, not a programming language.

I've read many books on PKI and there are not many good ones out there. This one used to be the best among some very awful books, which wasn't saying much. It was excellent on covering the standards of PKI such as they exist, but otherwise said very little about installation, layout, protocols, and design, common problems, and real world solutions. Most of what they said was repeated multiple times throughout the book. Sometimes even on the very next paragraph. They took two/three pages just to say that the top down approach to PKI planning is better than slapping in a service just to support a single product. Stating the obvious didn't win any points with me. They discussed outdated or barely used protocols like SET, and didn't bother getting in depth at all with protocols that are in use like SSL. They discussed Single Sign On like a simple PKI install will solve all our problems, completely missing the outstanding problem of vendor interoperability. Active Directory and PKI are only mentioned in passing with no operational details. Get Klaus Schmeh's book or the Housley book instead.

I think there's some merit to people expecting a more hands on approach in a book like this. But those expectations seems unrealistic. The book is not titled "Implementing PKI," it's called "Understanding PKI."

There is value in a concepts book. For experienced technical professional trying to get a grip on the terminologies and concepts of security and PKI, this book is succinct and touches all the major points.

For those looking for screenshots of people right clicking icons, there's a thousand other books like that! Most of those so called "technical books" are not that technical. It's nice to have a book that's not product specific for a change.

This book does what it intends to do well. There is a need for more technical books but this book is valuable in it's present form. I have given several copies to peers.

I hope this review helps you balance out your opinions before deciding for or against this book.

This book does a terrific job of explaining how various applications can use PKI and what PKI requires from an infrastructure stapoint. Part III, Deployment COnsiderations, is exceptionally good at how can PKI can be used from a practical standpoint. Strikes just the right balance between theoretical and practical. Technical detail was totally sufficient for me and included everything up to but not including a discussion of the actual mathematics behind public key encyrption.

Highly recommended!!

This book is very useful for a beginner in Access. Not very difficult to go through, however, seems to lack examples. Nevertheless, the book is worth the purchase for someone willing to learn querying, reporting and forms.

Product is OK Not what I expected. I thought it was a full program of Access.

This book has many samples to work from. It is very useful tool for someone to use to pull informtion out of a database.

All the other reviews must have been written by the published or author because this book was definitely not 4.5 stars. The content is good, but if you are trying to learn access it is pretty confusing and annoying to use as a reference. Not enough examples and too many wordy descriptions which become confusing and annoying to decipher. Not to mention my book came missing about 50 pages.

If you are a beginner then there is some value. Any higher skill level then you will find that the book lacks meat - nothing new or exciting or creative to forms, reports or queries that you could not get out of some dummy book. No cd to practice with and some of the examples are unclear.

After spending many hours trying to figure why the sample code didn't work, I found the answer buried on Jesse Liberty's message board. A fellow reader points out an error on Jan 21 and as of June 26 Jesse has yet to update his errata. Most tech books have a decent size errata and that is to be expected, but for an author to fail in his responsibility at the cost of many collective hours by his readers is extremely inconsiderate. This book is in my trash can at the moment.

Are you a Visual Basic programmer? If you are, then this book is for you! Author Jesse Liberty, has done an outstanding job of writing a book that makes you productive immediately to create Windows and Web applications using Visual Basic and its associated tools.

Liberty, begins by describing how to respond to events to build interactive applications. Then, the author shows you how to use drag-and-drop controls to create that connectivity, how to query with parameters, and how to build master/detail pages. He continues with a review of built-in browser controls. Next, the author discusses custom controls. Then he shows you how to use GDI+ and other techniques to draw dynamic applications. He also shows you how to detect mouse events and respond to them. Then, he shows you how to integrate legacy Com controls in a managed situation. The author continues by showing you how to create complex and sophisticated Windows applications. Next, he shows you the library of controls created for you to greatly simplify these tasks. Then, the author walks you through the controls that makes mastering pages and navigation a very easy task. He continues by showing you how to update the database and manage multiuser applications. Next, the author discusses personalization. Then, he shows you how to create web services and also how to create applications that use web services. He also takes you into some of the nooks and crannies of this tool. Next, the author provides a review of the visual basic language in detail. Then, he shows you how to use the new generic collections to create type-safe stacks, queues, and dictionaries. Finally, the author provides a slightly more formal overview of the visual basic language.

The goal of this most excellent book is to make you immediately productive, creating Windows and Web applications using Visual Basic and its associated tools. Thus, by creating applications, you will learn Visual Basic as it has evolved for .NET!

I absolutely love Jesse's books and articles. However, this book does not have a page dedicated to ADO.Net nor does Jesse talk about the debugging methods of VS 2005.

I understand writing a book is not easy, but I feel these are two critical components of .Net development

What's with the negative reviews on amazon for this book?!? Plain and simple, Jesse Liberty is one of the top technical writers out there in the field today and I have YET to read a book by him that I haven't liked. Who cares if there are a few typos in a book, the main things that I am concerned about are if the writing is good, the layout is easy to follow with images and graphics put in at the right places, and the flow is tight and concise. The author achieves all of these goals in this book -- quite simply, if you use Visual Basic 2005 and you want to become a better programmer and desire to learn from a true expert in the field, pick up 'Programming Visual Basic 2005' today... you won't regret it.

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I have been through many VB books including expensive college texts. I immediately found this to be the best one. I picked it up at a Borders (oops...) because I was sick of ordering books online and not liking them when I finally got them in the mail. After I read the first chapter in the book store, I didn't want to wait to get started so I paid the $40.

I found that something simple like naming conventions or form design can ruin a potentially great book. Jesse Liberty uses the standard naming convention (txtName, btnSelect, etc.) and is not nearly as strict with form design as most books I have been through.

I recommend this as a second book because, though chapter 15 and 16 are superb in describing the basics, the complete beginner may be better off with a "For Dummies" book or something like that.

Some SQL knowledge also makes the book go down easier.

Lots about how to assemble and connect and initialize all the necessary hardware components. Very little about how to get MS Windows to orchestrate the network functionality. As per usual, Windoze makes it look real simple, but in fact, nothing works. The book is no help

This book is a good introduction to the basics of networking, but provides very little "advanced" information. Most of what's in the book can be found on any number of web sites dedicated to the subject of networking. I was looking for more of an understanding of the nitty gritty details of computer networks, but didn't find what I was looking for in this book. There's very little troubleshooting information, which is a surprise given how often "troubles" arise when networking computers.

If new to networking stop, look, and read Home Networking: The Missing Manual. Scott Lowe did it again by explaining the how to establish a network for your computer(s) and associated devises. He explains networking both Macintosh and Windows Operating Systems, printing, file sharing, and data storage using systems ranging from power lines to wireless.

Not included (nor expected), but of personal interest to me, would be information about controlling home devises with X10 through powerline communication.

Home Networking: The Missing Manual is a great book for those wanting implement either wired or wireless communication networking.

This manual explained many things in a simple format. I would recommend it to ANYONE who is not well versed in home networking. It is easy to read and understand. I had my network and a friend's network up and running in no time thanks to the information in this manual!

The book is clear and it's easy to follow the steps in setting up a home network. Unfortunately the book assumes nothing will go wrong and when it does,and it did for me, there are no steps outlined to help determine what is wrong.

Since the wizard is pretty straight forward the book wasn't much use. I would have liked more discussion of when to use the default and when to customize.

The book advises a minimum 8 gb system drive. Even with Exchange et al on another partition the updates eat up most of the 8 gb quickly causing performance problems. I suggest 14-16 gb wth hard drives so cheap and the time wasted if you have to repartition.

Another place the book recommends the hard drive be at least 2 gb. That may be the minimum per MS but the author should provide realistic minimums.

This book is fine for an overview of the features included in SBS but, if you need to set it up, this would not be a book that I would recommend. In fact, I wish I could get my money back.

The author approaches the set-up as if it were almost an out-of-the-box program and does not address any of the potentially major problems that can crop up. - And a lot do - just check out the TechNet newsgroup for SBS on Microsoft's website - http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsServer2003/sbs/community/newsgroups/dgbrowser/en-us/default.mspx?dg=microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs

The main problem with this book is that so many things can go wrong with SBS and she has only 6 pages on troubleshooting, and it is totally basic - which she admits by naming the chapter 'Troubleshooting Basics' - but what about troubleshooting is ever basic and where is the 'Advanced Troubleshooting' chapter???

Plus, there is no section in this book on troubleshooting the set-up process.

She writes for troubleshooting: "'Repeatedly ask why?'; 'Ask, 'what just changed?'; 'Cut the problem in half'; 'look for a simple solution'; 'gather evidence', 'write things down' etc. -

What? Have none of us gone through a basic science class! What would have been helpful would have been if she went over what CAN go wrong - you know, typical scenarios.

For example, critical elements like the fact that you need to register with a third-party provider a second domain name for your local network, etc. are not covered in the book.

Under 'Domain Name Naming Conventions' the author writes:

"Typically, companies separate their Internet presence from their internal network by using a different extension. If your company already has an internet presence (website), you can use the domain name with the .local or .office extension. If you don't already have an Internet presence, you should consider a domain name that is somewhat descriptive of your business..."

What the author forgets to mentions is that, whatever you choose, you have to register it - EVEN IF you already have an internet presence and EVEN IF it is only for the internal network.

She gives this super-basic overview of domain names when the entire functionality of SBS is dependent on the DNS. I would say that most people picking up this book know already that a internet domain name needs to be registered but what some people wouldn't know is that an internal domain name also needs to be registered. More information on setting up an internal network is not there.

She took the easy way out and she does this through most of the book.

This book is great for those that only work on small business server on occasion. I refer to it every few weeks. a great reference.

This is a great resource for anyone who is installing or maintaining Windows SBS. There are a lot of screen shots so you know where you're headed and the information is clear and concise. I didn't want a lot of technical jargon, just a book that could help step me through the setup and installation and help me avoid common mistakes. This job filled the bill and I'd recommend it to anyone who's working with SBS.

With few exceptions, this book simply instructs the reader to accept default prompts and reiterates the choices offered by dialog boxes. I suspect the book has two target audiences: 1) small business owners who don't want to know much about SBS and just get it running, and 2) those who need to get it running but also want to learn about the program. For the first group, I suggest you save the time you would spend reading the book and do whatever it is you do to make money and use it to pay an IT professional to install and configure SBS. For the second group, I suggest you buy another book that explains SBS in greater detail.

I highly, highly recommend this book to anyone who either is taking a course in cryptography in school or wants to learn about it. It is a very well written book which clarifies a lot of basic concepts. I bought it as it was recommended by my professor in school and managed to get an A in the course. It is a good book and I think it helped me come back after a lecture and find all the matter that I needed. Good reference material.

I am using this book in a senior eletrical engineering course. This is an excellentally written text, though very mathematically. Even though it recommmends a calculus based course in Probability I would recommend a you also have a good grasp on working with modulus or mod (n). A course in number theory would help too. If you don't have hat then extra time should be dedicated to a course using this text.

The authors of the book are obviously very knowledgeable about the subject matter. This book would have worked well as a reference to lectures delivered by the authors. But for self-study, this book provides INADEQUATE mathematical explanations.

My bachelor's degree is in Physics, and my commercial computer experience totals 11 years. And yet I found it hard to follow many of the mathematical assertions of the authors. If you are willing to accept the mathematical assertions on FAITH, then you will likely feel satisfied with this book. But if you want to UNDERSTAND the mathematics, and you want to be able to PROVE to yourself that the assertions and theorems are true, then you may find the explanations inadequate, as I did.

This book really REQUIRES a very strong foundation in Number Theory. My Physics course was not concerned with Number Theory. If you are like me, who has not finished a college-level course in Number Theory, then you might have the same difficulty in understanding this book.

The writing style of the authors does not help, either. They seldom give solved examples of the mathematical concepts they are presupposing. The end-of-chapter Exercises and Computer Problems are supplied with no feedback answers. The authors do not define two mathematical objects, that they use, and which I do not recognize.

In the first several chapters, the authors make about 10 mathematical assertions that they do not prove or demonstrate. These are embedded in "explanations" seeking to explain something else. But since the "explanations" make use of undemonstrated mathematical assertions, they fail to elicit understanding in the mind of the reader.

To summarize, this book is more like a textbook in support of classroom lectures, NOT for self-study seeking UNDERSTANDING of the subject matter.

Trappe and Washington give us a very up to date education in cryptography, circa 2005. The discourse is for a sophisticated maths student who, however, need never have encountered cryptography before. The level of mathematical treatment is good and rigourous. With theorems stated and proved at a level that should satisfy even a picky mathematician.

The recent nature of the book is reflected in several places. Notably where it explains the Advanced Encryption Standard, or Rijndael. This is significant because it is endorsed by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology as the replacement for DES, in such contexts as electronic commerce. (DES is also covered by the book.)

Interestingly, the authors offer a short chapter on digital cash. A fascinating look at a possible future direction of a (physically) cashless society. Other texts on cryptography rarely cover the topic, so it's good to see it here. Yes, the first implementations of digital cash largely died in the dot com crash. But the idea lives on, and may yet take fruit. It has solid intellectual foundations, as shown by the book.

Then there is an even more speculative chapter on quantum cryptography. Radically different from the symmetric and public key cryptosystems described in the rest of the book. Who knows how quantum cryptography will turn out? Some very hard physical problems need to be solved.

The problems with this book are:
(1) The authors failed to explain the math involved in neither rigor nor
intuitive way. The authors frequently try to introduce algorithms before
explaining the concepts or definition.

(2) The book is a mixture of number theory, linear algebra, cryptography, mixed
almost randomly, without proper dependency logic. Neither cryptography algorithm,
no number theory or linear algebra concepts involved are explained clearly.

(3) It is more like a notebook taken by a student. It appears that the authors
simply submit the lecture notes for publication, none efforts were made to
turn a lecture notes to a published book.

Readers are not their students, they do not have access to the authors.
It appears to me that this is the only explaination, since I hate to doubt the
authors capability in writing a textbook in this field. I simply can not imagine
a competent professor in his field writing such a confusing textbook.

I hate to spend my time in writing this note, but this book wasted too much my time,
I just hope others will be lucky that I am. My knowledge in both math and CS are above
Master degree level.

I am a software developer looking for a quick introduction before I get deep into the guts of PKI systems. This book does provide such an introduction, but you have to be very patient to get it. Mr. Austin hops around from subject to subject, introducing new ideas in the middle of a completely unrelated section. He will begin a paragraph with "in summary" and then move promptly on to throwing out concepts that he neither defines nor uses.

Mr. Austin seems to be working very hard to keep the book relatively non-technical, so that anybody can understand it. Unfortunately, he seems to like tossing in technical concepts, explaning part of what they mean, and then moving on without using them. His examples are generally so non-technical that they are mostly worthless, while so poorly contrived that they still don't make any sense.

This book might be a valuable resource if someone spent time reorganizing it, editing the grammar, and cleaning up the examples. Until then, however, I recommend you find something else. I'm certainly going to.

Many times our rookies and our sales peoples have asked me to give them a brief intro to PKI. This book is exactly what they have asked for. Thorough enough to give a complete overview. Simple enough for non-techies to fathom.

This is not a book for those IT professionals who intend to dig deep into the very core of PKI principles and technology - But I don't think that was the target for the book either ;-)

A most disappointing book.

I am an IT Professional who has worked in the industry for over fifteen years and recently moved from applications development into an infrastructure role involving PKI deployment.

I bought this book to understand the major issues but found the explanations to be shallow and incomplete.

I would particularly like somebody to explain the "Key Components" section on page 41. Why is an XOR used (rather than any other logical operation)? What is the meaning of the example involving Alice, Bob, Chris and Dan?

I feel that in trying to "simplify" the subject Mr Austin has "dumbed-down" certain concepts so much that the educated reader is unable to make sense of them. I am now halfway through the book and it does not get any better. I am also not happy with the style of writing; it does not seem to flow well and I find myself having to read passages repeatedly to extract their meaning. There must be better PKI books on the market than this one.

I'm researching on PKI for my PhD in Information Systems. This means I have read the whole range of books on this subject. Without mentioning names, many of these books are either too generalist or too brief on key issues to make sense. That's why I'm sure Tom's book is simply the best out there on the subject. It is extremely hard to balance the needs of some techies who just want to copy and paste lines of code and business people who want to know nothing about the technical side. Tom has done this job magnificiently. My view is that if PKI is to be elevated from the pilot schemes that number about 70% of all adopters of the technology, we need books like Tom's that cover the subject without the usual fascination with keys. Therefore, if you want to get the big picture about PKI - with a tinge of technology and business - get this book quick!!

It is difficult to write a book for a technical as well as a business audience. Tom Austin has accomplished this task in his book PKI. Rather than simply present an in-depth technical discussion, Austin brings the technical arguements to a business audience and, for the technical audience, an overview of PKI technology and the business case for such an approach.

The book has five major sections. Security Basics places PKI within a larger information system security framework, introducing central concepts of cryptography and related functions. PKI Technologies examines the fundamentals of the PKI approach, including certificate authorities and hardware mechanisms. The PKI and Business Issues section cover a range of issues, such as acquiring PKI and enabling legacy applications. Then he presents Case Studies, where he shows how several large organizations (Bank of Bermuda, Perot Systems, Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and Reusch) made their business decisions in support of PKI and the implementation of PKI solutions. In his final chapter, PKI Efforts: Present and Future, the author discusses laws and standards as well as biometrics and PKI.

I plan to recommend this book to my consulting clients and those who wish to better understand the importance of PKI. If Tom Austin's book is an example of the Wiley Tech Brief series, I look forward to reading their other offerings.

Sanford Sherizen, Ph.D., CISSP

I felt this book was more pro-Macintosh that pro-non-MS-choice.

The book gives good tribute to Microsoft on the things that it has helped to establish and the main point on the book seems to be on the ways Microsoft it self has stagnated. In it self the book is good narrative on the way the computer industry made it's image of being the "next big thing" in the 90's and ending up as the "stale box used to access the internet" of the new millennium.

Some how the book just don't carry the title in it's contents

Tony Bove's JUST SAY NO TO MICROSOFT: HOW TO DITCH MICROSOFT AND WHY IT'S NOT AS HARD AS YOU THINK is for any who have doubts about Microsoft's products and patches. Introductory chapters cover all its flaws and move on to explain how one's PC can be liberated from Microsoft products entirely. Chapters provide background history of Microsoft, detail its practices which have discouraged innovation and competition, and explains how competing operating systems work and how users can obtain and use these systems. Finally: a clear history and explanation of Microsoft's pitfalls and how to overcome them - by switching to an alternative that works.

Contrary to what it may seem, there *are* viable alternatives to Microsoft. Tony Bove strongly suggests you adopt them in his book Just Say No To Microsoft - How To Ditch Microsoft And Why It's Not As Hard As You Think.

Contents:
Part 1 - You Say You Want A Revolution: Playing Monopoly Is No Longer Fun; All You Need Is A Mac; Linux - Land of the Free, Home of the Brave
Part 2 - Rehab For Your Microsoft Addiction: Slay the Word and You'll Be Free; De-Microsoft Your Office; Media Lib - Microsoft-Free Music and Video
Part 3 - The Whole Network Is Watching: The Message Is The Medium for Infections; This LAN Is Your LAN; Browsers and Your Own Private Identity
Part 4 - Getting On With Your Computer Life: Twelve Steps to Freedom from Microsoft; Where Do You Want to Go Tomorrow?; The Truth Is Out There; Citations; Index

If you're a Mac fan or a Linux fan, you'll most likely agree with everything Bove says. He is rabidly anti-Microsoft, and has little to say that's good about the company. Microsoft's cash cow software, the Windows operating system and Office, is drawn and quartered as being overpriced and buggy. The alternatives are to use either Mac's OS X or a Linux desktop distribution. As far as Office, he makes the strong case that the free OpenOffice.org suite will allow the vast majority of the users to do 100% of everything they're used to doing, with virtually no learning curve. Browsers? Protect your computer, dump IE, and go with Firefox. The net effect of all these suggestions is to have an environment that costs far less than comparable Microsoft offerings, as well as having a more secure computing experience.

By no means is the author even-handed in his comparisons. The writing is strongly opinionated, but that's what makes it fun to read (in my less strident opinion). Some of his statements caused me to mentally step back and wonder why I continue to live with some of the limitations that Microsoft has put on my computing experience. While I won't be removing all vestiges of Microsoft from my computing environment, I will be more willing to question the common wisdom going forward...

I agree with the other reviewers who spoke of errors. The book twice states that Linux was invented by a Norwegian student, presumably mixing up the separate countries of Norway and Finland. It is generally known that Linux Torvalds was in Helsinki, which is in... Finland.
The writer is a Mac advocate, and there is nothing wrong with that; though maybe this could have been made clearer in the publicity.

Load up a computer today with a basic set of applications software, and there will be a de facto Microsoft tax on that computer. Add roughly $100- for the Windows XP operating systems and $350- for Microsoft office, and you have a significant initial financial outlay. If one would use an open source operating system and set of office applications, the cost savings would be enormous. That is why the option of open source is so financially compelling to the both the consumer and organizations have thousands of computers. And open source is correspondingly such a threat to companies such as Microsoft. The idea of saving money and never having to worry about a blue screen of death is the proverbial win/win scenario.

With that, Just Say No to Microsoft: How to Ditch Microsoft and Why It's Not as Hard as You Think would seemingly be a most valuable book in helping consumers and corporations rid themselves of the Microsoft tax. Unfortunately, the book spends far too much time slurring Microsoft and Bill Gates.

The books main charges are that Microsoft has been far too predatory and that Bill Gates is not the technical genius that he is made out to be. Microsoft's questionable business tactics are not without ethical lapses, but it must noted that Microsoft is simply one in a long line of companies that have used their size and deep pockets to quash the competition. Microsoft is not alone and joins companies such as American Airlines, Ford and General Motors, Wal-Mart and more that have engaged in practices that while good for their stockholders, have not been good for the competition.

Bove is correct that Microsoft's practices over the years have discouraged innovation and stunted competition. But then again, that is true of Ford, GM and other such companies. The innovations of Ford and GM for example have been mostly superficial, without any significant improvement into crucial issues such as gas mileage and more.

Two of the companies that Microsoft has been accused of destroying are Novell and WordPerfect. Yet much of the blame for the demise of these two companies goes to their management that did not know how to properly market their products nor deal with a competitor such as Microsoft. This is not meant to imply that Microsoft is blameless; rather that Novell and WordPerfect had plenty of opportunities to fend off Microsoft, yet did not rise to the challenge.

Aside from the pervasive anti-Microsoft tone and style and the book, Just Say No to Microsoft: How to Ditch Microsoft and Why It's Not as Hard as You Think provides a good starting point for those that are looking for a cheaper and safer alternative to Microsoft products.

Chapter 1 start with an overview of the history of Microsoft and how it grew to be the largest software company in the world. In chapter 2, All You Need is a Mac; Bove feels that the quickest route to Microsoft freedom is by purchasing a Macintosh. While a Mac is not necessarily cheaper than a Wintel system, the Mac OS X is considerably more resilient against attacks. In addition, the concern of malware such as viruses and spyware are much less of an issue on a Mac.

Chapter 3 deals with what worries Microsoft the most - Linux. Bove notes that large companies that deal with thousands of end-user desktops are discovering the advantage of migrating to Linux in a big way.

Chapters 4 and 5 deal with Microsoft Word and Excel. Word documents have become the de facto standard for document exchange and are what has locked many people into staying with Microsoft Word. Excel has a similar power in being the de facto spreadsheet. Most people think that the only alternative to Word is WordPerfect and simply don't know about OpenOffice Writer and Calc or other open source alternatives. The two chapters show how it is possible to effectively collaborate on documents without having to use Word.

While the book does not get into every open source alternative to a Microsoft product, Bove's web site has a comprehensive list of open source alternatives to Windows products at [...]

Chapter 4 concludes with a look at the technical and practical problems with PowerPoint. Bove notes that the corrupting power of PowerPoint is so strong that otherwise normally articulate speakers turn into zombies mumbling the bullet points that appear on the slides behind them. It is not clear though how Impress, the open source alternative to PowerPoint is necessarily better from a presentation perspective.

The next few chapters deal with Outlook, the application that has launched countless viruses and worms, and also detail other network-based problems with Microsoft protocols and applications. Issues such as the never enduing cycle of Microsoft patches are also discussed.

Chapter 10 provides a 10 step program (fashioned after the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 step program) to free the reader from their Microsoft addition. While the steps are brief and effective, it would have been better had there been more technical details on how to migrate out of a Microsoft environment. For the person with thousands of documents and files in various Microsoft formats, it is not as effortless as to simply copy your old files onto a USB drive and move it to the new open source based host.

The book contains four parts, and there are four cartoons at the begging of each part that Bove wrote. The cartoons are quite funny in their own right and Bove should also consider a career as a cartoonist.

Ned Ludd said that the machine was the enemy, and Tony Bove feels the same way about Microsoft. For evidence, check out his campaign to stop the spread of Word documents at his web page.

The only negative to the book is that there are far too many anti-negative stories of Microsoft's predatory practices. A few stories would be adequate, but there is no point in belaboring the issue in a book that is meant to be more technical and practical, as opposed to political.

For many people who don't know better, they expect that a blue screen of death and monthly patching is part of a standard computing environment. Just Say No to Microsoft: How to Ditch Microsoft and Why It's Not as Hard as You Think is an interesting read that will open the eyes of those users to a cheaper, more secure and robust open source solution.

This author obviously knows his material. He provides a lot of examples of how to work with SOAP. All of the examples ran once I compensated for my Web server--the example code uses the author's Web server URL for the obvious reasons. Every example demonstrated one or more SOAP concepts. The examples didn't continuously repeat concepts, as is the problem with many books.

The author mixes a little theory with a lot of demonstration. I personally found the mix very useful. Some books assume you want all theory and no demonstration, while others have all demonstration and very little explanation. This book is a nice combination of both.

As with other people writing reviews, I did stumble on the graphics in Chapter 4. However, I feel this is a minor problem given the clarity of the explanations.

My only other concern is the use of VB examples almost to the exclusion of anything else. I would have liked to see a few more Visual C++ examples. I did appreciate the PDA example and the appendix on BizTalk server. The tools appendix is also very worthwhile as it saved me time building a toolkit for SOAP applications.

I gave this book five stars for content. The book contains a considerable number of examples, all of which worked for me. Most helpful was the PDA example. At least I know how to get a single application to work on both a PDA and a desktop machine now.

The book is filled with lots of helpful information about troubleshooting, problems that I'd run into (and I did run into several of them), and how to get the best performance from my application. I'm sure the wealth of Web site listings will come in handy too.

The graphics in Chapter 4 are absolutely absurd. They start going off track about Figure 5. It looks like the last two figures in the chapter were supposed to be inserted at Figure 5 and 6. I don't blame the author for this because it looks like he did a great job in every other respect. Hopefully the publisher will fix this problem.

This is the worse computer books I have ever seen. So many error, just stupid mistakes. For example, many of the screenshots are switched so the captions don't match up to the picture, so it is completely impossible to follow. Most of the step-by-step is wrong. And I couldn't get one of the samples to work. (...)

I had to get SOAP up and running between a Java client and a Microsoft IIS web server within three weeks, and this book has provide most of the information I needed to accomplish the project. It has an excellence flow, and provides very useful examples. It also has many links to websites that have additional details for specific topics. I highly recommend it for anyone who are interesting in SOAP. However, it is important to note that this book is geared toward the Microsoft platform. As with any new technology, you need to get information from different resource. If you're using SOAP on the Microsoft platform, the online MSDN contains many examples and update information on SOAP. I found the SOAP newsgroups extremely helpful. It contains solutions to many problems that programmers in the real world encounters. If you will not be using SOAP on a Microsoft platform, I recommend "SOAP cross platform web service" by Scott seely.

This book is definetely one of the better SOAP books around, particularly if you're looking for something that stays focussed and presents a balanced view of the technology. In fact, as you read this book, the author's numerous caveats about shifting standards, incompatabilities, performance and security problems, etc. might make you wonder why you started down the SOAP road in the first place. Here's a few other things I noticed:

1. Possibly contains the largest number of URL references of any computer book I've read (links to specifications, third party tools, etc.) including a whole appendix on SOAP tools.

2. Does NOT contain much code at all, which is OK for me, but if you want it, the author provides it for free on his web site. (This keeps the book relatively thin, which I truly appreciate!). What code there is is fairly Microsoft (and VB in particular) oriented, though, there are few .NET references.

3. Focussed and avoids a lot of repetition from other books re: related technologies such as XML, SAX/DOM, etc.

A good mix of theory and practical advice and above all, a much more honest and balanced (eg. relatively hype-free) view of the world than is typical.