referencebooks

The New Hacker's Dictionary, 3rd Edition

Compiled by Eric S. Raymond

Published by MIT Press, 1996.

This is a 6" by 9" paperback with a very colorful and amateurish-looking cover design for a book from MIT Press. It's 547 pages including the appendices and bibliography, plus a sizeable preferatory section.

The "New" in the title of this book is somewhat misleading. While this edition is indeed much revised from previous editions, the bulk of it is a lexicon of the culture of greybeard hackers rather than the current lingo, and its entries are often markedly nostalgic. This is more of a feature than a bug, as long as you know what to expect.

Here is a list of the first sixteen entries in the "E" sequence, see references not included:

• earthquake
  
• Easter egg
  
• Easter egging
  
• eat flaming death
  
• EBCDIC
  
• punched card
  
• echo
  
• eighty-column mind
  
• El Camino Bignum
  
• elder days
  
• elegant
  
• elephantine
  
• elevator controller
  
• elite
  
• ELIZA effect
  
• elvish
  

There is a lot of colorful material here; the book paints a fascinating picture of a subculture. The entries are written in a way that seems to welcome you to the that geeky male club of staying up all night programming and eating junk food and making nerdy jokes.

Here's one very typical entry, just for fun:

incantation n. Any particularly arbitrary or obscure command that one must mutter at a system to attain a desired result. Not used of passwords or other explicit security features. Especially used of tricks that are so poorly documented that they must be learned from a wizard. "This compiler normally locates initialized data in the data segment, but if you mutter the right incantation they will be forced into text space."

This is a useful and entertaining reference book.

Cybercrime: A Reference Handbook

By Bernadette H. Schell and Clemens Martin.

Published by ABC-CLIO in their Contemporary World Issues series in 2004.

This is a 6" by 9" hardcover book running to 247 pages in relatively
large type - a pretty short book.

Its intention is to provide an extensive introduction to cybercrime, or
crimes commited with computers, primarily security exploits and
hacking.

The book is divided into seven chapters, as follows (in parentheses are
selected chapter sections):

1. History and Types of Cybercrime (Basic Cybercrime Terms, The White
   Hats, The Black Hats, The Nonoffenses of Cybervigilantism and
   Hacktivism, Using Anonymity to Conceal Cybercrimes)
   
2. Issues, Controversies, and Solutions (Computer System Intrusions,
   Cracking, Flooding, Spoofing, Viruses and Worms, Operating Systems--Are
   Some More Secure Than Others?)
   
3. Chronology (Cybercrime Timeline, References)
   
4. Biographical Sketches (Ada Byron, Steve Jobs, Kevin Mitnick, Dmitry
   Sklyarov, Richard Stallman)
   
5. Cybercrime Legal Cases (Summary of Legislation, Trends and
   Observations in Cybercrime, Computer Crime Cases)
   
6. Agencies and Organizations (Government Agencies, Independent
   Organizations, Suppliers of Products and Services)
   
7. Print and Nonprint Resources (Books, Web Sites, Film)
   

As a handbook, the discussions of issues tend to be fairly comprehensive
and thorough, good for reading cover-to-cover or by chapter for
introductory knowledge.