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Linux Firewalls (3rd Edition) Review by The Barber; not of Seville
A Must-Read for a solid foundation
I have 'fiddled' with Linux systems for some time, almost exclusively as servers (My personal preference is OSX/Win for work stations), but I have never before felt like I knew enough to put together a gateway firewall system on my own, so I have always had help with that.
This book has helped me to truly begin to understand how iptables works. I have previously used a Shorewall interface for working on a firewall, but I found that things were just a step or two too abstract for my liking. Linux Firewalls gave me a good (not excessive!) helping of background/theory, and then started showing me actual firewall scripts, interspersed with explanations for almost every command issued.
The book is not for a complete Linux/networking novice. It really does not help you if you don't already know how to do important administrative tasks like assure that the firewall script is executed at the proper time, or know how to fill in the blanks of things that are not strictly Firewall related. That's what I liked about this book, personally: It did not explain to me what a Shell was, or take 50 pages to describe the OSI model (yet again!), and it does not lecture too much on what is or is not the proper way to do things. It just shows you how to do various things, and gives you the information you need to be able to go from there.