Instead of trying to research, fully understand, and adequately explain attacks that have happened to other people networks - the approach taken by too many authors of books about computer security - Schiffman lets network administrators and security experts tell their stories first hand. What's even better is that Schiffman has edited each of their war story into two parts: one that presents the sysadmin or security consultant observations made at the time of the attack, and others (in a separate section of this book) that binds together the instructions and explain exactly what happened . Let us call this book what it is: an Encyclopedia Brown book for people with an interest in network security. It does not really matter, from the viewpoint of value-for-money, whether your expertise will be able to face the challenge or not. Remember every time you've seen the movie or read a book with scenes of the computer, so technically inaccurate they make you want to authors with instructions.