The Real Hackers' Handbook

by Paul Day, Dr. K.

This title re-examines the whole phenomenon of hacking, from its beginnings in the computer networks of the 1980s, through some of the legendary hackers and their exploits, to the basic tools hackers use today, and how to guard against them.

Genres: Technology

272 pages, Paperback

First published July 7, 2011

Reviews

[Paul Waring · Rating 2 out of 5]

Effectively a condensed view of all the various ‘hacker’ text files you used to be able to download. Worth a skim through for historical interest, but this is not a good book if you want to learn how to secure systems.

[Michael Flynn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly this is a terrible book. The title says it's a handbook, yeah right. It's basically a runthrough of historical details about certain (not even close to all) hacking methods. The author goes into on average two paragraphs of depth per subject, with the first paragraph unfailingly being an unbearable trumpeting about how illegal doing the stuff is, every, single, time. You get tired of hearing the old "you definitely should not try this at home" at maybe the 50th time he goes over it, and it starts to make you wonder how long the book would be if he had just one paragraph at the beginning with a legal disclaimer and never brought it up again. Probably 40 pages, not even joking. At one point he starts talking about "blue boxing" and goes into his paragraph about how illegal it is, and then never says what blue boxing is! I checked.. This book has no substance, and real worth. The only reason I gave it 2 stars instead of 1 is because, being completely new to the hacking scene, I learned a lot of hacker vocabulary from this book (program names and such, but not how they work!), but I could have learned all that a lot better from a different book.

Do not buy this book. It is a waste of time.

[Rob · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting topic, to be sure - but this reads like a dump of readmes from a hacker's hard drive. Typos abound, and some of it is curiously anachronistic for a book published this recently.

[Bryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

really good content, but sadly most of it is already outdated, a nice reference book nonetheless.

[Edmond Lepedus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very informative first dip into computer security.