Security Books Reviews: A Humble Opinion

Something I wanted to add this year to the uncountable list of security-related tasks I'm involved in, is the publication of security books reviews. As I end up reading several security books, mainly technical, throughout the year, I thought it may be interesting for some people to know the opinion of other readers (myself included ;) before getting a copy of a specific book. I hope you find my comments and reviews valuable in your book buying decissions.

Apart of publishing the review in the RaDaJo blog, I plan to insert my reviews in Amazon and Bookpool.

The idea is to follow a common review format for each book I dig through, including:
- Book details: Title, author(s), editorial, publication date, ISBN, and book reference.
- Summary: A brief and descriptive sentence reflecting my overall impression about the book.
- Score: A numeric score from 1 to 5, being 5 the top score (an excellent book).
- Review: Several comments about the book contents, including what I enjoyed the most and the less, my previous experience on the book topic, as I'm convinced that the value of a book is highly conditioned by the knowledge the reader has on the topic, the type of audience that could benefit from reading the book, as well as any other comments and opinions that come to my mind at the time of writing it. Comments might be focused on the book or on the topic covered by the book.

BTW, most publishers provide a free sample (in PDF format) for their books, so I'm including the book reference so that you can get all the book details and also have access to the sample chapter. That way you can read one chapter and see if the book seems to be what you expected from my review ;)

Due to the huge amount of technical security books published yearly, you could easily spend your whole life (without doing anything else) buying and reading them. These book review posts try to provide you useful details and, as a result, save you some time.

I have a few books in the current queue, so you should see some reviews published in the following weeks. As I'm starting this new task, and typically very busy with other security research and services, you will see that some of the books on my queue were published some time ago. I still think people may be interested on buying them today, so this is why I'm reviewing them.

If you are interested on having me reading and reviewing a specific book (because your are a frequent reader or a publisher), send your suggestions to radajo@gmail.com. If I like the topic, most probably I will go for it, digest it, and publish a review.

Time to improve your security skills with additional literature!!