Ubuntu Made Easy May Have Achieved Its Noble Goal

A new No Starch Press title sets out with the intention of making Ubuntu Linux accessible to newcomers of the more timid kind. It may very well have succeeded.

If you've been part of the open source community for a while, you will have seen quite a few books and that set out to make some version or other of Linux accessible to beginners.  While some of these efforts have been quite compentent and admirable, others have been too shallow, barely rewritten from a template originally created with other systems in mind.  Others again have failed by being simply too massive and not actually very beginner oriented past the first ten to fifteen pages or so.

It's fair to say that a new Linux beginners' book has the odds stacked against it in several important ways. But then for a greying unixer like myself, there is the always a lingering hope that the next Linux or other Unix for beginners book will finally get it right, and manage to strike the right balance between a gentle learning curve and providing enough information to be genuinely useful.

So when No Starch Press asked me if I would like a review copy of Rickford Grant and Phil Bull's Ubuntu Made Easy (I have a pre-existing business relationship with No Starch Press, see note at the end), I hesitated for a few minutes and told them I'd take a peek.

When my review copy landed on my desk a few weeks ago I had already had access to PDF version for a little while.  Seeing the total page count in the PDF I was at first a little worried that this would be another one for the too big to be useful category.

But I needn't have worried. The writing in the approximately 420 pages of core text flows well and the subject matter is presented in a way that in my limited testing on less experienced users (I do not have easy access to truly fresh newbies, unfortunately) seems to build a useful and gentle learning curve.  A gentle learning curve does not necessarily mean low information density, however -- even my not totally green test subjects all found pieces of new information or useful tips in all chapters.

The text (with fairly frequent and useful illustrations) flows through a total of 22 chapters and four appendixes that takes the reader from a very gentle introduction to the system (even suggesting that you run from the live CD at first, only committing to a permanent install once you've gotten your feet wet) through a sequence of smaller projects in a full range of Linux desktop life topics that are clearly designed to both expand the users' skill set and to build their confidence in their own abilities.

After the project or task oriented chapters that make up the bulk of the book, the later chapters include an introduction to interacting with the Ubuntu community as well as a fairly useful symptom-oriented troubleshooting guide.

More experienced users may opt to skip or browse rather quickly through the early chapters, but as I mentioned earlier, even the more experienced may be able to find new information or at least a fresh perspective on familiar topics in various sections of this book.

So my verdict is that all in all, I think the authors of Ubuntu Made Easy may be very close to succeeding in the much longed-for goal of making a Linux beginner book that is actually useful to beginners.

Title: Ubuntu Made Easy - A Project-Based Introduction to Linux
Authors: Rickford Grant with Phil Bull
Published: No Starch Press (San Francisco), July 2012. 480 pages.
ISBN: 978-1-59327-425-2

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Note: I have a pre-existing business relationship with No Starch Press.  The good people there had the patience to work with me through the process of writing three editions of The Book of PF, and they have sent me review copies of more books than the ones I've actually gotten around to reviewing.

Practical Packet Analysis Is Good Fun [Book Review]

If you've wanted to take a peek at what network traffic really looks like, but put it off because it sounded all too complicated, a new book may be just what you need to get started. Practical Packet Analysis is an excellent network analysis introduction.

When Chris Sanders' Practical Packet Analysis (with the subtitle Using Wireshark to Solve Real-World Network Problems) was originally published in mid-2007, to generally very favorable reviews and quite respectable sales for a network book, the memory of Wireshark's predecessor Ethereal's eviction from the OpenBSD package system for too many unfixed security bugs in a short time was fresh enough that most of us in the OpenBSD contingent generally shrugged and moved on. The criticism of Ethereal centered on the fact that there was next to no separation between the packet capture part of the system (which needs to run with elevated privilege) and the analysis-related parts (that do not in fact need to). At the time I was also rather busy working on a book of my own (full disclosure: also a No Starch title), so I mentally filed Wireshark under 'things to get back to', possibly to look into reviving the OpenBSD port.

Nevertheless I was quite pleasantly surprised when No Starch Press contacted me a little while back and asked if I would like to have a review copy of Practical Packet Analysis, second edition. The book is a pleasant read and good fun, and in fact the program compiles from source fine on OpenBSD, but more about that later.

After a brief introduction that contains summaries of the numbered chapters and practical information such as where to get the sample packet capture files, Practical Packet Analysis leads in with a chapter called Packet Analysis and Network Basics, which introduces the reader through an introduction to network protocols in general and how packet sniffers fit in the general picture.

The chapter then goes on to present the classical ISO seven layer model and makes a credible attempt at mapping those to the slightly fewer layers of the TCP/IP stack before going through a discussion of common variants of networking hardware and touches briefly on classes of network traffic (multicast, broadcast and unicast).

The second chapter, Tapping into the Wire focuses mainly on how and where to position your network tap, introduces a couple of different hardware devices for the purpose and even touches on ARP spoofing as a tap technique before giving a first glimpse of how to display and interpret captured traffic using the Windows utility Cain & Abel, and ends with a summary that includes a flowchart to help decide on the most useful tapping technique for the task at hand.

The third chapter, Introduction to Wireshark, introduces the book's main tool, with installation instructions for the more common operating systems and an initial walkthrough of the graphical user interface. While the install instructions are not correct in all details (when installing from source, you do not actually need elevated privileges until you get to the concluding make install step), they should be sufficient to get most readers started with minimal fuss.

Finishing up the chapter with a section that moves quickly to Your First Packet Capture is a nice touch that emphasizes the practical approach that's typical of this book.

Chapter 4, Working with Captured Packets, walks the user through some highlights of the filtering, analysis and presentation features that makes working with the likes of Wireshark fun. Much of this functionality would be available or at least fairly familiar to a seasoned tcpdump user, but this walkthrough does illustrate that sometimes a graphical interface can be fun too.

The chapter also leads off with fairly weakly worded advice that packet capture and analysis are likely to be separate activities. Considering that Chapter 3 introduced Wireshark's ability to choose interfaces by point and click in a dialog box (indicating that the program runs with elevated privileges), I for one would have found a stronger admonition very helpful.

An inexperienced reader will likely want to view the packet capture of her own network traffic animated and in full color, so at this point or earlier it would have been useful to include a note that on Unixish operating systems, either of these three commands

$ sudo tshark -w - | wireshark -k -i -
$ sudo dumpcap -w - | wireshark -k -i -
$ sudo tcpdump -e -s 65535 -i <interfacename> -w - | wireshark -k -i -

will at least buy token security in that only the packet capture runs with elevated privileges, the analysis tools run as your regular user (and yes, <interfacename> is where the actual interface name goes).

Fortunately, for the rest of the book, the activities are firmly centered around the packet capture files collected by the author himself. Chapters 5 through 11 present a variety of specific traffic scenarios that showcase the analysis and presentation features (including various graphing options) that make Wireshark a useful tool.

There are several memorable moments to be found here, including a packet capture that demonstrates how a successful compromise of a Microsoft Windows system (getting a privileged command shell) could look like at the network level. There is a wide variety of examples, and most of them are clearly designed to nudge the reader into exploring further. A good selection of protocols and protocol features are explained with a learning by doing approach, but there is enough that's only hinted at to let an interested reader look up the Further Reading appendix to dive into the rest.

All in all Practical Packet Analysis, second edition stands out as a book that's a very useful learning resource, and one that makes the learning process a lot of fun. Seasoned network professionals will most likely not find much new material here, but the book is a good read for anyone with a networking interest and I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy the hours you spend leafing through it before you hand it over to your junior network admin or your students.

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Title: Practical Packet Analysis, 2nd Edition - Using Wireshark to Solve Real-World Network Problems
Author: Chris Sanders
Publisher: No Starch Press, San Francisco
Published: July 2011
Pages: 280
ISBN: 978-1-59327-266-1
Price: USD 49.95 for print + ebook, USD 39.95 for ebook (PDF, Mobi, and ePub formats)