Sockets, Shellcode, Porting and Coding review

Verdict:

Review Date: 23 Jan 2006

Price when reviewed:

Our Rating 2 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

This book is about hacking, but you may not guess it from the title or subtitle, Reverse Engineering Exploits and Tool Coding for Security Professionals. You might not even guess if you look inside.

Author James Foster starts with a slight and strange discussion of C, C++, C#, Java, Perl and Python. You'll need to know a lot more about these languages than this book tells you. The same is true of most of the book, containing as it does long, rambling explanations of what should be obvious to any trainee hacker.

A lot of the content seems to be presented to pad the book out to a reasonable number of pages. Occasionally it reads as if the author has lived on Mars for a few years and has just encountered some of the technologies. But then we dive into x86 assembler as if it were second nature. The author seems to be much happier with low-level techniques than new high-level technologies.

The book aims to make people aware of the threats hackers pose. However, those interested in Windows should know much of the discussion is about UNIX or Linux. And while the book provides the occasional insight into how hacking works, you can easily disregard 90 per cent of it.

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