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Two Practical Books


By Andrew Binstock
July 1, 2006 — 
I’ve been itching for a while to talk to you about the following two books, which have both impressed me a lot. They fall slightly outside of pure software development, but they deliver practical, hands-on information that most every one of us can use.

“Time Management for System Administrators” by Thomas A. Limoncelli (O’Reilly, 2006) appears to be yet another instantiation of the self-help book that promises to teach us how to “work smarter, not harder.” The trouble with most of those books is that they are endlessly repetitive. They take one or two good ideas and then present them over and over in varying forms of testimonials and anecdotes until 200 pages later, you wonder why if the author could work smarter, he didn’t present the same matter in just 10 pages. Limoncelli eschews this approach of constant retelling. His book is crammed with good ideas that derive from the day-to-day life of administrators and other support personnel.

Because he writes from the perspective of a techie, the tips and suggestions ring true. (As opposed to the self-help books, which always appear to be oriented toward salespeople and business executives.) Because the setting is familiar, the tips and techniques also have immediate applicability. For example, Limoncelli explains how to stagger sysadmin shifts and divvy up responsibilities among the team, so that one person each day has a long block of hours to tackle the hard problems that require extensive, uninterrupted effort. The author also addresses time-management chores that will be very familiar to all of us: prioritizing tasks, making meetings more efficient, managing e-mail. And he integrates familiar technologies: how best to use your PDA to streamline daily activities, using Wikis to get docs posted quickly, automating repetitive tasks via scripts, and so forth.

The book is an easy read, and at a suggested retail price of US$24.95, well worth the time and cost. It has a few limitations, however.

The sysadmin material is all Linux/Unix-oriented, so many of the examples will not apply to Windows, even though the ideas behind them have obvious, direct parallels. The author also comes across as young in certain ways: He rarely discusses topics related to management, and he occasionally throws in sophomoric items (such as a life goal of “dating a porn star”). These quibbles aside, any techie in the trenches will find the book far more useful than all the other “time management” handbooks available today.

“Steal This Computer Book 4.0” by Wallace Wang (No Starch Press, 2006) is a terrific guide to the world of hacking, cracking and malware. It has the same sense of “here’s how you do it” as found in Abbie Hoffman’s original “Steal This Book” classic—but without the subversive, counter-establishment tone.

Wang leads the technical reader through a tour of the underbelly of computing. He explains, for example, how viruses are written, how they attach to the system, how they replicate, and of course, how anti-virus software scans for them and blocks their activity. He does the same thing for worms and Trojan horses. Later, he explains how crackers identify sites that appear to be vulnerable and how they take them over.

Predictably, dictionary attacks on passwords and password-cracking tools are also presented and discussed in detail as are keystroke loggers, backdoors, sniffers and other ways of getting at data without the user’s knowledge.

The style is eminently readable, and made even enjoyable by the sense that you’re seeing how the bad guys operate. But beyond this excitement, the book has immediate value. The problem is that if you don’t visit the venues where the data and tools Wang presents are available, you tend not to think about your own vulnerabilities or how the crackers could get to you.

For example, I have a document that I want to post as a password-protected document on my FTP site. I think I have a pretty good password for it, but because I’ve intentionally made it easy to remember, I don’t know how safe it really is. I’d love to run a brute-force dictionary attack on it and see how I do. Likewise, I’d like to run a dictionary attack on user log-ons for the network I manage as a volunteer. The trouble is I simply don’t have the knowledge about which tools to use or even how to use them effectively. I’m a developer and have very little time for explorations outside my immediate area of expertise, alas. Wang’s book gets me where I need to go.

Developers and managers typically are so busy that time management and security frequently fall off their radar screens even though they recognize their importance. These books will help get you back on track in both areas.

Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst at Pacific Data Works.


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