Do you have any comments on it (or is it still a preorder)? I see we can't even have a peek on the table of contents.
By the way, HN, what would be your advise for a good technical book on "cracking". I mean, not a collection of ad-hoc recepies, but some generic knowledge, however something where you don't hesitate to open your gdb/wireshark/etc.. : for example I remember I enjoyed reading http://insecure.org/stf/smashstack.html a long time ago.
The industry standard answer to that question is "The Shellcoders Handbook", though I think you'd be better off with "The Art Of Software Security Assessment" and a lot of man pages.
I would get under the hood of metasploit and see where that takes you. Or read the old phracks. Even four years ago phrack was talking about inserting kernel modules without root perms. Neat stuff!
I'm taking a course right now in operating systems, a big section of which is on security. All of our required readings for this section have come from metasploit/phrack/insecure.
The state of the art in reversing is more advanced on Win32 than under Unix. Pretty much the only reason a normal person would break out assembly under Unix is if they're a toolchain developer, whereas direct x86 programming is part of Win32's cultural heritage.
By the way, HN, what would be your advise for a good technical book on "cracking". I mean, not a collection of ad-hoc recepies, but some generic knowledge, however something where you don't hesitate to open your gdb/wireshark/etc.. : for example I remember I enjoyed reading http://insecure.org/stf/smashstack.html a long time ago.