The Craft of System Security Book Review

Book Review For:

The Craft of System Security
by Sean Smith, John Marchesini

Useful for the Novice and Professional

5 stars

The preface of the book says that the book grew from a college course to solve this problem: “to provide the right security education to students who may only ever take one security course and then move on toward a wide range of professional careers.” Its nice when the authors put the goal of the book at the front, it makes reading it in the proper context much easier and reviewing the book (usually) much easier.

I think the authors met their goal of a book to give to people who may only read one security book in a college course and have it be readable and useful. It is written in an understandable manner and provides enough pictures and explanations for someone new to the subject who “has to take the class” and enough math and further reading for someone that wants to really delve into a subject to do so. Important words are in italics so if you wanted to or needed to look up the definitions to really understand the section you could, but there is enough information in the paragraphs to get by.

The book also has the added plus of being useful to someone studying for their CISSP (if they actually want to know the subjects). It explains topics that, in my opinion, are not explained very well in the study guides. Their discussion of the orange book was superb and I wish I had this book when I was trying to make sense of it when I was studying. The chapters on cryptography go beyond the typical Alice and Bob stuff you get in most books (Alice and Bob are still there) but they also get into examples of breaking cryptography and explaining how the attacks work and usually backing it up with the math involved. I really could say something good about every chapter in the book. Each chapter is laid out with a solid, consistent road map, is full of quality readable content, and wraps it up with a “take home” message at the end.

The Table of Contents doesn't seem to be available on Amazon but if you are interested in the book, I'd recommend you take a look at it over at the InformIT site. It covers a lot of ground in its five parts of History, Security and the Modern Computing Landscape, Building Blocks for Secure Systems, Applications, and Emerging Tools. The book also comes with a huge list of references and a pretty good index for looking up topics.

I usually have my list of likes and dislikes for books. For this book I don't have any dislikes. The book is readable, well edited, a good font size, and I learned things from it. I've been actively recommending it to people at work, especially the guys working on their CISSP.