Rating: 

This book took me a long time to read, but for a good reason, I kept implementing
the various hacks in the book on a server I had started setting up.

The book is mostly Unix related, but there is some Windows related ‘hacks’ as well.
I think the Windows coverage was lacking a bit though. For Unix, it talks about
Linux, the BSD’s and a bit on Mac OS X and Solaris. Most of the topics are
general enough to apply to any Unix based Operating System, but some are specific
to an operating system.

One of the great things about the Hacks series of books by O’Reilly is that the
information is presented in nice small chunks that you can read in a few minutes
if you have some spare time.

The hacks are all ‘hyperlinked’ to each other, if a hack mentions something that
relates to another hack, it is highlighted in blue and the hack that it
references is listed. I did find a few places where this wasn’t done
(#84 Real-Time Monitoring, first mentions Barnyard but doesn’t provide any
information on it or mention that it is one of the later hacks).

Lots of the hacks in the book could be found by doing some reading on the
internet, but finding such a variety of topics all in one place, with enough
information to get you started is really nice. Even though I consider myself to
be fairly security conscious, I still found quite a few things in this book that
I hadn’t thought of, or plain didn’t realize were possible or even existed. I
would recommend this book to anyone that is interested in security or anyone
responsible for maintaining a server (whether or not it is on the internet).