PACKT publishing, September 2011

BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner’s Guide!

I received a copy of this book one month ago. Due to other projects, I couldn't start reading immediately.

Vivek Ramachandran wrote this book.  Vivek is a security researcher originally from India who seems to be good known on all security conferences.

The book is not too big (about 200 pages) and you find many screenshots of terminal outputs. And you will need these screenshots because they explain many things even better than a long description.

Why BackTrack Linux? The author writes his motiviation in the preface. BackTrack is a distribution with lots of security utils already on board. I tried it with Debian stable because this was already installedon my laptop. This works too, but you have to download and build several tools by your own.

I read the book like a thriller! Every chapter has several sections where you get step by step deeper into the wireless analytics. I knew most basics before. But didn't know how easy it is to crack a WEP-encrypted network. And I learned that hidden ESSIDs help absolutely nothing!

It's good to know the handling of wireless on the linux console and to understand basics of the protocoll. But if you don't: you learn it quite fast with the book howto bring up your wireless interface with iwconfig, wpa_supplicant and co.

But It's not only reading. It's practical beginner's guide. It makes fun to follow the steps described. And I was happy to fail to crack my WPA2-protected network with the dictionary attack.

There is a sample chapter online about the advanced WLAN attacks. There you can enjoy the screenshots even in color :-)

In the last chapters you start working on RADIUS networks. This complex topic is made a little easier with BackTrack Linux because there is already a preconfigured freeradios-server installed.

REVIEW

PACKT Publishing annonced a new Book: The Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook. That's exactly what I love with Linux. Writing shell scripts. I'm looking forward to review this book. It should be in my postbox soon.

Update 2011-03-30: The book has just arrived.

?Update 2011-04-14: I just started with the first chapter. All chapters have funny names. The first one is called "Shell Something Out". I'm not sure if these titles helps you when looking at the table of content.

The first chapter shows you lots small examples with your shell. But it only describes the bash (Bourne Again Shell). There is no hint that bash is not used as default shell in ubuntu and debian anymore because it is huge, slow and has many "bashisms" - bash specific and not portable syntax.

But ok, I learned hacking with bash too and it is more? feature-rich than dash and fast enough for most daily scripting.

There is another point missing: You learn using a bunch of tools: cat, date, tput, tee, tr, echo and more. But the author doesn't tell you howto get more information about each tool. There are man-pages, "--help" output and for sure lots of good websites online.

In the second chapter you learn very much about find. The author seems to love it. And he knows it very well. It's really interesting. Also sort, tr, uniq and other tools are presented with short examples. Most examples are a step-by-step guide.

I've still not finished with the book but I think it's not suitable for very beginners. But it is really helpful and interessting for people having written their first scripts already.

On about 20 pages the author guides you through adding a custom banner, an self-updating timestamp and a dynamic logo / exchangeable logo image.

It's always the same procedure and you get it explained with very good screenshots and a funny but exact description of what to do. In every step it's getting less descriptive because you know the steps with TemplaVoila already.

At the end, you have a logo on top which you can replace by TypoScript, a timestamp which you can configure with TypoScript and a banner which you can exchange in the "Edit Page" context.

A lot of progress in only 20 pages!

You learn in this chapter the HMENU object which generates hierarchical menus. First you do this with text menus (TMENU) than you swith to graphical menus using GMENU.

Because menus are very import for the user acceptance of your site, the book spends quite a lot pages for this subject. This is done very good as in the chapters before every step is based on its predecessor.

Here I learned howto make a breadcrumb menu (it's so easy!) and howto use my favorite TTF-font with GIFBUILDER to dynamically create menu items - even with rotated text. Great. The result, you see on the screenshot on the right.

In Chapter 5 you start using multiple templates with your installation. You learn howto create a template for different sidebars (left, right, left and right). For the editors using your templates, you add icons to make the selection easier.

After this step, the author introduces the extension templates, I'm using a lot. As example you add a different logo and view on the products site.

At the end you create a printable template and add a link to toggle between these two views.

As in the other chapters it makes fun reading the simple story around the common thread.

If you really follow this chapter, you have to type a lot. But the author points out that all sources may be optained from the packtpub website: https://www.packtpub.com/support/. You have to enter your email there and you receive a link to the sources of the whole book.

Why do we hack a template by scratch? It's to show you howto survive without the TemplaVoila wizard. Even when the wizard can't help you.

As example, we create a new template for a newsletter and create a sample one. It's fast done and nevertheless interesting. But this is only a step before chapter 7 which goes much deeper.

Rather interesting part in this chapter is the configuration of the RTE (Rich Text Editor) in the TYPO3 backend. I didn't like the htmlarea RTE in the past because it is/was so slow. But for the review I used it and modified it following chapter 7.

At one point I was looking for more than one hour for an solution because Jeremy Greenawalt missed a point in his example. It's not a "we can add" but a "we have to add" the RTE.default.proc.allowedClasses to our page TypoScript. Otherwise the changed color won't be saved to the database and is lost.

Second point in this chapter is the backend layout of the newsletter and the columns view for the editors. I've done very quickly a backend layout for the newsletter following the steps in the book. I haven't modified the backend layout yet. Interesting.

At the end, the author describes the new handling of the data structures as of TemplaVoila 1.4.2. I haven't tried it yet. It sounds interessting but also very, very beta and confusing.

REVIEW

Recently Packt Publishing contacted me and asked for reviewing their new TYPO3 4.3 Multimedia Cookbook.

I am working with TYPO3 for more than two years now. Embedding multimedia elements in TYPO3 is not always obvious how to do it. So I am pleased to receive this Multimedia Cookbook to learn even more and write this review.

The book makes a very good first impression. Not too thick, an easy to read English and a balanced amount of screenshots. Remember: it's a cookbook!

It is divided in 8 chapters  on 206 pages, a preface and an index:

Preface
Chapter 1: Getting Started
Chapter 2: Managing Digital Assets
Chapter 3: Operating with Metadata in Media Files
Chapter 4: Rendering Images
Chapter 5: Rendering Video and Audio
Chapter 6: Connecting to External APIs
Chapter 7: Creating Services
Chapter 8: Automating Processes
Index

 

The book requires some basic TYPO3 knowledge to be able to follow the examples.

Nevertheless the author spends one chapter with setting up apache, mysql imagemagick and TYPO3 on Linux/Debian and Windows. My first impression was, that this chapter is rather a waste of book-space as there are other books by Packtpub like the Official TYPO3 Book by Fritz/Hinderink/Altmann which describes in details how to setup TYPO3. But following the next chapters, this introduction makes very much sense. It's easier to follow the author if you're talking about the same system and template setup.

The second chapter starts with the real content - installing the Digital Asset Management (DAM) extension. This extension will be used throughout the book. By the way, you learn how to write a simple frontend plugin.

All multimedia files organized with DAM are indexed and their metadata is read during the indexing process. Chapter three describes this process very good for images and audio files.

The simplest multimedia elements are images. Chapter four describes the usage of (indexed) images in text/images content elements and inside the Rich Text Editor. One image gallery is pointed out by Dan Osipov: the ce_gallery which is quite slim but uses already the DAM extension. It's a pity that this extensions seems to be not in active development anymore.