Monday, July 22, 2013

Network Security Monitoring Book

Last week I happened to notice that Richard Bejtlich's new book, The Practice of Network Security Monitoring: Understanding Incident Detection and Response, was available for pre-sale form the No Starch website. After considering it for a short time, I decided that I would go ahead and make the pre-sale purchase, and that I would buy the hard copy so that I would get the free eBook with it. This afternoon I downloaded the eBook (all three formats of it) and the hard copy should be mailed to me next week sometime. But, I am not sure what I think about this yet.

I am actually in the middle of reading two books for book reviews. One book review is for the SIGSOFT quarterly publication and the other is for the SIGACT quarterly. I have really enjoyed doing these book reviews as it gives me (usually) a free copy of a new book and I get to share my opinion with any of the readers of these journals. It is these two current reviews that I am doing that makes me a little uncertain of my choice to go ahead and buy the Bejtlich book: do I have ANY time to actually read this book right now?

I hope so as I am looking forward to this book! Other than a general respect for Mr. Bejtlich's accomplishments and my understanding of his position on things that interest me, the book had one HUGE selling point for me: Doug Burk's SecuirtyOnion. I am a major fan of SecurityOnion and I think it's inclusion in this book is just awesome! It also looks as though the book goes beyond just the installation and configuration of SecurityOnion in that SecurityOnion seems to be the foundation of the book itself.

More about this book in the future...

As of now, the book is still available for pre-sale and has a 30% discount available:

http://nostarch.com/nsm