Firewalls for Dummies

I picked this up for a curiosity check for some people that are getting interested in the security world. As with the Dummies line, this book is meant as an introduction to the concept of a firewall. If you ever asked "What's a firewall" then this book is for you. If you are looking for specific configurations or what to do when you are under attack, you will not like this book. I gave it high marks because it discusses many concepts such as caching, stateful inspection, load balancing, protocols, etc. However, it does not go heavily into the technical which could make a non-IT person go comatose. There are some discussion of attacks such as Denial of Service, Trojans, etc. but they are rather basic in nature. Again not a book for the advanced. There is a decent discussion on policies and a reasonable discussion on NAT, that should give the inexperienced a good idea of these areas. There are some discussions on deployment which the book might have been trying to reach the corporate environment. However, the value maybe only for managers who would not be involved with the firewall or they simply could have been left out. The book mainly feels for the small networks and the home user and probably would not care about three pronged firewalls. The chapter on Linux firewalls talking about iptables and ipchains felt like it was an addon due to the rise of Linux. Having said that; it still was a decent introduction. It just felt out of place. The chapters on Zonealarm, BlackIce, Norton, ISA, and Checkpoint are useful to a degree. They do discuss the products and they go into setup. However, you will probably read the information parts but probably will end up skipping the configuration sections. The last two chapters are useful as they give you websites for 10 tools(though a couple have changed) and sites to find information about Firewalls and security groups. Overall, it's a decent book for the beginner. Avoidable for the professional.

I would have titled this "And if you want to know about Space Exploration join the United Federation of Planets". The idea of any book is to impart information to the reader and this is what this book does. I certainly would not give this book first time out to Grandma and expect her to understand it but some reviewers really do believe that to read a Dummies Book you have to be a "Dummy" some people actually have an IQ above 100 and a jopb that does not involve serving food. For people with an interest, managers and technicals just starting out its a good cheap and informative read. 5 stars.

The authors and the technical editor of this book have done a superb job of making the complex subject of firewalls accessible to a wide audience. Regardless of your level of experience, you will be able to take something of value away from this book, whether it is a basic understanding of firewalls or some deeper insights into the complexities of NAT, IPSec, VPNs, and Kerberos. From setting up a personal firewall, such as Zone Alarm, to setting up multiple industrial-strength firewalls involvings DMZs, you will find a lot of good information and advice.The authors show a concern for crafting clear, economical, and easy-to-understand explanations of otherwise difficult concepts. Their experience as consultants and educators is obvious. You could buy more expensive and abstruse books on firewalls, but you probably won't enjoy them as much and you probably won't get as much out of them. The authors have done a great job.

I don't really like the Dummies title, but I have found that Dummies books are very often written for people like me, who don't consider themselves Dummies at all. I was hoping that this one would be an easy-to-read introduction to firewalls that also provided some useful information. I was not disappointed. Like other Dummies books, this one is very easy to approach, but it went far beyond that. I started reading this book because I wanted to get a good basic background in what firewalls are. The first few chapters did accomplish this. They also got me to think about quite a few computer security issues I had not even considered before. I especially liked that it helped me with setting up a personal firewall. At the same tiem I know that I can get back to the chapters on other, more powerful firewalls in the future. What surprised me about this book was the level of detail it went into in the chapters on how to configure a firewall for complex scenarios, such as VPN solutions. I actually also learned a lot about other, related computer security issues. Right now I don't need all of this information, but it is good to have a book that has information that I will fins useful in the months or even years to come. Many Dummies books are very approachable, and this one os no exception. However, I found that this one didn't stop at the basics. Rather, it went into topics should be useful even for someone who has to set up and configure a firewall in a medium-sized organization.