Rating: 
Summary: Great for understanding SSH, useful for configuring it.
Review: I find too often that SysAdmins simply slap a pre-configured SSH onto their systems and do not truly understand how it works. Tasked with implementing SSH at my UNIX site, I found this book to be useful both in understanding SSH, and actually configuring it. This book is heavily weighted towards SSH1 and SSH2 and provides a wonderful amount of detail. However, I found it's coverage of OpenSSH to be lacking. I had to search the internet for a good deal of supplementary material to get OpenSSH working the way I wanted it to.
I truly enjoyed the books explanation of how a secure channel is established before login occurs. This explains the "magic" of the authentication process that is so integral to SSH. Its explanation of publickey authentication is also excellent. It helps you to really understand what SSH is for and how it can be used.
Examples are a bit too cluttered at times and are lost on the reader. I was also expecting a better explanation on how to "implement and administer" SSH at my site. For example, creating SSH packages and keeping known_host files updated. I have found the most useful information on these topics from various internet articles.
If you're truly interested in the inner-workings of SSH, I would strongly recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Slowly getting it
Review: Although not entirely difficult to follow, this book was useful after a little ssh hands-on.
Rating: 
Summary: Technical Reviewer
Review: Blimey, this book is great. Although I am an experienced SSH user, its amazing to see the volume of subject matter covered. The authors have done a really good job at capturing all the essential elements - and much more. They should get a lot of well-deserved praise for providing us with this much needed text. Mike Smith Technical Reviewer.
Rating:
Summary: I have true Endearment for this text!
Review: First, let me say that this book is approbation at it's finest. The pleasurableness of Daniel J. Barrett's information is a focus for subrdinate students striving for information. The consternation involved is damaging to a young physche looking to be accepted, therefor, I simply can not, and will not approve of minors reading this text. But, folks I am just a lazy drunk and I don't know what I'm talking about. So, do what you wish!!!!!!!!!!! :) :) :)
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for beginner and intermediate users
Review: Great books for ssh beginner. The illustrations are great. The examples are clear but they are a bit unclear at times. The biggest disappointment is the missing debugging part. For most users, it's the steps that leading to the working environment are the parts that count. Personally, nothing's on the Internet is working "out-of-the-box", especially this ssh application. The coverage on ssh on Windows are very misleading and some parts are incorrect. I do not know if Mr Barrett or Mr Silverman have ever set up a sshd process on an Windows NT server or Windows 2000 server. Good luck to those who want to set up sshd server process on Windows NT/2000 machines !
Rating:
Summary: Good book untill you really need to put SSH to use
Review: I bought this book several months ago because I was considering implementing SSH into a systm. Prior to reading the book, I had little understanding of SSH other than that it provides secure versions of popular tools such as FTP.
I initially read most of it during a cross-country flight. It was really good, and I came away with a good theoretical understanding of SSH. Now here I am several months later trying to actually implement it, and I'm not so pleased with the book. Infomation is scattered throughout the book. If you don't believe me, take a look at the index, it is online here at the Amazon site. As you are reading a topic, the texts suggests you bounce to another page, then another, and another. It's very confusing. Also, probably not so much of the book's fault, but there are a lot of flavors of SSH (both protocols (2) and implementations (many)). I find it very difficult to understand which material in the general text applies to the version I am using. There is a good index that does break down some commands and associated options / arguments by SSH implementation.
One good thing, though, is that I emailed the authors a question, and one of them actually responded.
Rating:
Summary: The Definitive Guide for SSH, excellent format.
Review: I consider myself a prolific reader of O'Reilly books, and out of the many I have read, I find this book one of the best. Its strong points are its excellent writing style, excellent formatting, and comprehensive treatment of the subject. I find the writing style to be very easy to read, and entertaining, but more importantly, the authors make every effort to clarify important SSH concepts, and then relate them to later chapters. The fact that the authors take the time to review and relate the information covered in previous chapters is something most authors miss, yet is very effective in making sure the reader will remember the information in the long term. The format too is excellent in subtle ways. When the authors refer to a concept in another chapter, they mark the chapter and section number in brackets nearby. This makes looking up information much easier, and is another thing computer writers tend to overlook. I sincerely hope these guys write more books for O'Reilly. In terms of covering SSH, this book can't be beat. Admittedly, the focus is very much on SSH for Unix, but the authors admit that from the start and point out chapters that are useful for PC/Mac users. This book covers every facet of SSH1,SSH2, and OpenSSH, and covers all three effectively. To summarize, anyone interested in SSH is strongly encouraged to read this book, particularly if you use Unix/Linux. I feel that reading this book was time very well spent, and feel much more confident in regards to using SSH.
Rating:
Summary: Good from a practical viewpoint
Review: I had a lot of problems with the "technical" description of the SSH 1 & 2 protocol suites. It seems to me the authors have a half-baked understanding of cryptography theory and a half-baked understanding of the SSH Internet Drafts, and have then combined them to provide a muddled and misleading overview of the protocols. I think that with a topic as complex and important and network security, it is important to be accurate, and I do believe that you can be accurate without delving into every single detail. But I continue to find passages all over the place (in particular with respect to host- and user-authentication) which leave me scratching my head and wondering: "is this misleading English, or is it just plain wrong?" SSH-1 is described in this way. Then, the authors proceed to build upon this shaky foundation by describing (in a very handwaving sort of way) how SSH-2 differs from SSH-1. In the process, they gloss over some very fundamental differences between the two protocol suites. On the other hand, I think the practical presentation of ssh as power tool is very good, and well worth reading. It is the best practical description of ssh that I have encountered.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Content, Very Poor Organization
Review: I had some experience with ssh prior to purchasing this book, but picked it up to learn about more advanced topics like key pair generation for unattended ssh tunnels. The content of the book is ok, but the organization is horrible. The authors mix SSH1, SSH2 and OpenSSH and it is easy to get confused as to which files or commands belong to which. To add to the confusion, OpenSSH now appears to support SSH2 protocol so a lot of the file names don't match up. That makes the book a little out-of-date. The biggest complaint is that there are no "cookbooks". I wanted to do something well-defined and relatively common. There was a section suited specifically to what I wanted. However to ACTUALLY IMPLEMENT the technique, I had to flip back and forth between 5 different sections, plus infer some information about file contents. There are few complete configuration file examples. There are snips of files scattered throughout a section - again making for a lot of navigation through the book to assemble sufficient information to get the job done. The index is marginal, which makes this poorly-suited for a reference manual. In all, a real disappointment for a O'Reilly book. The editors must have been asleep at the wheel.
Rating:
Summary: SSHweet
Review: I recently finished reading SSH, The Secure Shell, The Definitive
Guide, by Barrett and Silverman over at O'Reilly. This book is
exacly what the title says, it's a definitive guide to SSH. It covers
installation and use. It incorporates SSH usage in a semi how-to
fashion but it also contains what How-tos would leave out. It
describes the how and the why related to protocols, procedures,
programs (scp, sftp...) and configurations. Through out the book they
discuss SSH1, SSH2 and OpenSSH (less) and a comparison of what one
SSH version has over the other. It covers aspects like Installation
and configuration, X11 Forwarding, Securing IMAP Auth and many others. This book covers both the server and client aspect of SSH and I
would recommend this book to anyone who would like an in depth
look at SSH.
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