Category: Book-Reviews
Book Review: Malware - Fighting Malicious Code by Ed Skoudis with Lenny Zeltser
One of the great things about general purpose computers is their ability to automate large parts of our life, and remove many of the less interesting tasks from our to-do lists. Unfortunately, this is a double edged sword, as attackers can remove much of the drudgery of compromising systems, as...
Book Review: The Art of Computer Virus Research and Defense
The basic concept of a computer virus is a simple thing - a bit of code which can replicate itself. Of course, the mechanisms through which a virus replicates (does it infect files? the boot sector of a disk?) and the manner in which a virus protects itself from antivirus...
The Codebreakers
Considered to be one of the best books on the history of cryptography, David Kahn's *The Codebreakers* truly is a monument to cryptography - and a sizable one at that. At more than a thousand pages, this book is not for a bit of light summer reading. However, to get...
In Search of Schrodinger's Cat
John Gribbin does a good job at relating the history of the discoveries in quantum physics, and manages to explain most of the actual physics that he touches on. Although *In Search of Schrodinger's Cat* shows its more than 20 year old age in some respects (especially when referencing electronics)...
The Hunting of the Quark
*The Hunting of the Quark* follows the development of particle physics, tracing from the development of the concept of the atom through to the first evidence of the quark. Probably the most noticable thing about this book, is it is not a book which should be read without some prior...
The Code Book
*The Code Book* by Simon Singh relates the history of cryptography, from the basics of hiding secrets which begins in ancient Greece with stenography, and then moves into the start of true cryptography with the invention of the monoalphabetic cypher. As he follows the changes in cryptography, it is not...
Cryptonomicon
Many people have written reviews on Neal Stephenson's *Cryptonomicon* before, but many tend to be overwhelmingly positive, even to an extent that they claim that the book can change your life. Perhaps I've read a broader variety of books, and that has lead me to be a bit more judgmental...