This is a series of essays, and it doesn't have any overarching theme. As such, the result is mixed -- there are some good bits, and some awful bits. Some bits were good just from a historical perspective (i.e. the development of Sendmail) but overall it was not very enlightening.
Reviews and Comments
I like books.
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Review of 'The architecture of open source applications' on 'Storygraph'
3 stars
Will Sargent reviewed It's Not All About Me by Robin Dreeke
Review of "It's Not All About Me" on 'Storygraph'
5 stars
An actual good book.
Will Sargent rated How to drink: 3 stars
How to drink by Victoria Moore
"In the past few decades many of us have become sophisticated about food, but we have not given the same …
Will Sargent rated Reality is broken: 4 stars
Reality is broken by Jane McGonigal
Visionary game designer Jane McGonigal shows how we can harness the power of computer games to solve real-world problems and …
Will Sargent rated Start Small, Stay Small: 4 stars
Will Sargent rated The psychology of judgment and decision making: 3 stars
The psychology of judgment and decision making by Scott Plous (McGraw-Hill series in social psychology)
Will Sargent rated Building Web reputation systems: 2 stars
Will Sargent reviewed Developing with Dojo by Matthew Russell
Review of 'Developing with Dojo' on 'Storygraph'
3 stars
If you want to develop with Dojo, this is the book.
No, seriously. There is only one book on Dojo, and this is it.
Will Sargent rated Software failure, management failure: 3 stars
Will Sargent rated American widow: 3 stars
Will Sargent rated Human Division #1: 4 stars
Review of 'Twittering from the Circus of the Dead' on 'Storygraph'
5 stars
Interesting.
Will Sargent reviewed Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward (Ballantine books -- 31666)
In a moving story of sacrifice and triumph, human scientists establish a relationship with intelligent …
Review of "Dragon's Egg" on 'Storygraph'
3 stars
It's a scientific paper. Think Greg Egan with less plot.
Will Sargent reviewed Building secure software by John Viega (Addison-Wesley professional computing series)
Review of 'Building secure software' on 'Storygraph'
2 stars
This book is from 2002. As such, it's a good book for its time, but it's hopelessly outdated for 2014. No TLS 1.2, no discussion of containerization, no actor model for concurrency to avoid race conditions, no bcrypt, no discussion of just using /dev/urandom for randomness...
More to the point, there are some disturbing gaps even in the book itself -- for example, it recommends cryptlib for TLS, but cryptlib only supports TLS-PSK, and doesn't do X.509 certificate authentication, so it couldn't do any secure PKI even if you asked it nicely.
The security principles are great, and I think you could write a book on the details of input validation, and on authentication in general, but this isn't that book. Buy something more up to date instead of this.