Comments about oreilly Network Security with OpenSSL:

I couldnt cope with SSL without this book, but I am knee-deep in

acronyms. A glossary would be a great help (it would save me compiling my own).

Comments about oreilly Network Security with OpenSSL:

This book has been tremendously helpful in wading through the enormity of OpenSSL. However, it cannot be stressed enough that chapter 5 is useless without downloading the examples from the www.oreilly.com site. In particular, the commands in the sidebar on pages 124-125 contain references to a .cnf file that is not available (anywhere, as far as I can tell). I suspect this is why there is a dramatic difference in opinions as to the usability of the examples -- one reviewer was trying to do this by hand; the other simply downloaded, tweaked, built and ran. I personally like to type the code in by hand, so I found this problem, and the lack of helpful information in the errata pages, very annoying.

This serious flaw mars an otherwise great book.

Comments about oreilly Network Security with OpenSSL:

OpenSSL is a terrific programming resource, but the online documentation on it

is hard to understand and index. This book brings most of it all together, and

provides enough examples to answer most of your questions.

One thing that it lacks is tie-ins with Java; most of its examples are in Perl

and Python. I'm currently trying to see if certain ideas can be implemented in Java.

A great book, and great read!

Comments about oreilly Network Security with OpenSSL:

Overall an excellent book. Before reading this book, I had played a little with OpenSSL, but found it very difficult to piece together the information needed to make use of the library. This book covered all of my problems, and gave me a good basic foundation in using the library. The only comment I can make is that the README file with the enclosed examples is a little unclear about how to compile the code, so ignore the chapter named files, and look in the ssl directory.

Comments about oreilly Network Security with OpenSSL:

This book is for anyone who wants to do real OpenSSL development. The authors have taken all the pain and headache out of trying to learn OpenSSL. The examples in this book are clear and easy to follow. Topics like PKI, certificate generation and management, and certificate authorities (CAs) are covered with the right amount of theory and practice.

Unlike one reviewer who had problems compiling the source code examples, I had no problem building and running all the examples on Linux. The only complaint I have is that each example is broken out into a seperate file, which can make it a little tough to piece back together, but even a novice C developer should have no problems.

Comments about oreilly Network Security with OpenSSL:

Examples are virtually unrunnable.

Specifically, there are no compile, link or platform instructions.

In addition, the examples are broken up into modules (Some without required #include's) and the required combination of source code to create a buildable app is left to the reader as an exercise.

I cannot imagine a platform upon which these examples could run.