New security handbook impressive

A few months ago, I was asked by my colleague Prof. Hossein Bidgoli to review the new _Handbook of Information Security_ published by Wiley this year. The work is immensely useful and I think that readers will find it a superb addition to their corporate and even private bookshelves.

In brief, each of the three roughly thousand-page volumes (list price $300 each) has three parts. The structure is as follows:

Volume 1

* Key Concepts and Applications Related to Information Security

* Infrastructure for the Internet, Computer Networks, and Secure Information Transfer

* Standards and Protocols for Secure Information Transfer

Volume 2

* Information Warfare

* Social and Legal Issues

* Foundations of Information, Computer and Network Security

Volume 3

* Threats and Vulnerabilities to Information and Computing Infrastructures

* Prevention: Keeping the Hackers and Crackers at Bay

* Detection, Recovery, Management, and Policy Considerations

I’ve scanned the front-matter and put it on my Web site as a PDF file showing information about Bidgoli and the editorial board, listing the complete table of contents for all three volumes and finishing with the list of the distinguished authors and their affiliations. I think readers will be impressed by the range of the 250-plus articles and by the quality of the contributors and their contributions.

When Prof. Peter Stephenson, the associate program director of the MSIA, and I reviewed these books we quickly opted to convert the required textbook used in our master’s program to the new _Handbook_ (and this despite the planned release of the _Computer Security Handbook, Fifth Edition_ edited by Sy Bosworth, myself and Eric Whyne in the coming year). We currently have four faculty members working on the course-material conversion and are assured by Wiley that the CD-ROM version of this work will be ready for shipment in time for our students starting their seminars this September.

On a side note, Bidgoli was editor-in-chief of two other massive and highly useful reference works, the _Encyclopedia of Information Systems_ (Academic Press, 2002) and the _Internet Encyclopedia_ (Wiley, 2003).

For a $150 publisher’s discount coupon for the _Handbook of Information Security_, go here.

[My colleagues and I in the Norwich MSIA program have no financial involvement with this work or any other text mentioned herein except as customers, and we have received no special consideration in return for publishing this review.]