Peter Norton's Network Security Fundamentals

Rating:
Summary: A good introduction to network security fundamentals
Review: As this book points out numerous times, network security is really a trade off between convenience (wide open with no restrictions) and safety (totally locked down to where no one has access). How this trade off is accomplished in today's typical networking environment is covered quite clearly and concisely in this short book.

Things I liked were the organization and explanation of each of the common security tools available, such as firewalls, third party authentication and VPN's, with clear discussions of the inherent advantages and disadvantages of each, as well as the authors recommendations on where each should reside on the network. The authors provide great references for additional resources on areas outside the scope of this book also, such as websites, organizations and user groups where more exhaustive information may be obtained.

What I found annoying was the boilerplate assembly process used throughout much of the book, where the exact paragraph or group of paragraphs as well as example figures, was replicated whenever a topic overlapped. For example, the discussion of smart cards came up in chapter 5, "Letting Users Connect Securely", along with a cute diagram of one style of hardware security token, and then again in chapter 6, "About Authentication and Passwords" we are treated to the exact same set of four or five paragraphs along with the very same example diagram.

Overall though, this is a very informative, if short (at only 232 pages), introduction to the subject of network security. Perhaps a better title would have been "Peter Norton's *Introduction* to Network Security Fundamentals."

Rating:
Summary: Helpful, but very repetetive
Review: The book has good information and is clearly written, but much of the information is repeated from section to section. The author covers security in one OS, then copied and pasted paragraphs at a time into security about another OS. Very annoying to re-read sections over and over. There is one two paragraph pasage that I have read five times in different parts of the book.

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent introduction
Review: This is an extremely useful primer on network security. After looking through a number of books, I chose this one as a starting point because of its clear organization and language.