[Gllug] Up-to-date Linux security books

[Nix]

On 17 Feb 2011, John Edwards verbalised:

>> On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 12:19:49PM +0000, gvim wrote:
>> I've been looking for up-to-date Linux security books and couldn't
>> find much published after 2005 on Amazon other than "Fedora 9 Linux
>> Administration and Security" (2008) and "Hacking Linux Exposed, 3rd
>> Edition" which has bad reviews for being off-topic.
>
> Books by their very nature are never "up-to-date", which may be part
> of the problem.

This does depend on the type of book. I just got Michael Kerrisk's
excellent Linux Programming Interface book, and it covers interfaces in
up to glibc 2.12 / kernel 2.6.35, which is pretty damn recent. (By
their very nature, userspace interfaces don't change fast and never
expire, so the book will never be *wrong*, just increasingly
incomplete.)

Security of course is a coevolutionary arms race, so things really can
change very fast :(

> Of course books have several advantages - more readable when
> travelling, easier to flick through than a computer screen,
> impressing visitors to your office.

Also, for a lot of things they collect together info that simply is not
available except scattered across years of mailing list traffic and in
scattered Unix lore. (That's why Stevens's Advanced Programming in the
Unix Environment was so valuable: half of what was in it had simply
never been published in book form before.)
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