Wireless Security: Know It All (Newnes Know It All) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This book consists of 24 separate chapters written by various combinations of 11 different authors. I mention this because I think it explains the poor organization and lack of internal consistency that plagues this work.
I can only assume that many authors didn't coordinate their plans with one another, because there's a tremendouns amount of repeated material. (Oddly, in one case the same author writes two chapters on cryptography that cover almost the same territory.)
Another problem is that different authors make different recommendations when covering the same material. For example, the chapter on implementing "Basic" wireless security (which turns out really to be about security for home wireless networks) advises the use of WEP -- a protocol that's widely recognized as being vulnerable. Later, in the chapter on "Home Network Security", a different author recommends using WPA instead.
Some of the material seems to be slightly dated. All references and screen shots for the Windows operating system refer only to Windows XP -- never to the current version, Windows Vista. Given that the book's copyright date is 2009, I would have expected somewhat more current information.
The book's physical layout is also a problem in one specific area: The size of screen shots. They're tiny and unreadable. Whoever designed the book's page layout seems to have decided that no diagram would be allowed to fill more than one third of a page -- no matter how much this might reduce its readability. In many cases, this leads to full-screen configuration dialogs appearing just as gray boxes.
All that being said, the book does cover a lot of territory. So for effort alone, it gets 3.5 stars. The thing that drops it down to 3 stars is the price -- it really isn't worth what Newnes is charging for it. Much of the information in this book can be found on the Web or in other, cheaper and more specific volumes.
I'm on the edge about whether to return this book; I'm leaning slightly toward "yes."


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