Some reviews May 28, 2009
I am not very good at reviewing things I have recently read, as I am not good at analyzing texts. It is much easier just to say whether it was good and helpful/interesting for me or not, and mark it as “the recently read”. But anyway I decided to write some small review of the what I was reading recently.
“The best of 2600: a hacker odyssey” by Emmanuel Goldstein, the author of the 2600 magazine. This book is a great collection of articles from the 2600 magazine since its creation and until now. It covers everything related to hacking, describes how it was back then and how it is now. Stories from circumventing some firewall, phone protection, to the architecture of telephone lines, computer networks and to the court processes. This books was particularly interesting for me for one reason: phreaking. I am really into old-style phreaking and love to read about the past technologies. However, there are a lot of other thrilling stories, especially about the court processes, police and FBI raids, and other. It really opens your eyes how unlawful corporations and the government could be in the chase for global control and money. If you are somehow related to the information technology I advice to read this book or some parts of it.
“A book on C” by Al Kellye and Ira Pohl. I never studied programming in school or university, however I feel the need for doing this. I have looked threw various books about C programming, but none of them were as good for beginners as this one. It is written with a very simple language so that when you read it, things seem very intuitive. A good deal of code examples and descriptions accompanies each chapter. This book gives the basics about C, however with these basics it is easy to start and quickly improve one’s own skills. A must read if you are new to C!
“The Wikibook of X86 Disassembly“Another great book, this time for newbie reverse-engineers. It is quite short (only 151 pages) with some chapters missing, but it gives a lot of insights on the compiler’s work, various patterns what different variables, arrays, loops, data structures will look like after the compilation process. It doesn’t really teach you how to disassemble the code and understand how the whole program works, but it brings you a bit closer to the achievement of that goal. It will be a lot easier to read more complicated books on reverse-engineering after having read this one. Also a must read book!
