Books Blog: English Literature & Linguistics

What should you name your blog?

This semester I’m taking English 354: British Modernist Novel at Cornell University. Here’s the course description:

Virginia Woolf observed, “in or about December, 1910, human character changed.” In her (tongue-in-cheek) statement, the early twentieth century inaugurated a very different understanding of character, and a consequent shift in the emphasis of the novel. The class reads novels by Woolf, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Jean Rhys, and Rebecca West, along with critical and theoretical writings by these novelists. Writing requirements include a weekly post to the class e-list and two ten to twelve page papers.

For the class, we’ll be reading the following books:

Snort for Dummies, by Charlie Scott, Paul Wolfe, and Bert Hayes, teaches basic intrusion detection skills through the Snort platform. Snort is an open source intrustion detection system for computer networks. It’s a free piece of software which resides on a computer and watches all of the network traffic passing through that machine. Unusual or dangerous traffic is flagged and recorded to alert the network administrator. Basically, Snort is a sentry for your network, on the lookout for hacking, viruses, and anything else you write a rule for.

Quite frankly, the book sucks. You’ll get at least as much from the Snort users manual, which is a free 90 page introduction to Snort. It’s 1/3 as long as Snort for Dummies, and fits in more content with less cruft. The first three chapters of Snort for Dummies introduce the software and its requirements. Why not read Snort – Lightweight Intrusion Detection for Networks and the Snort FAQ? Chapters 4 and 5 cover installation for Windows and Linux–but so does Snort’s Windows and Linux guides. The remaining chapters cover basic snort usage and configuration, and by basic, I mean basic. There’s nothing in there not in the manual, and explanation is not needed–how they manage to stretch out the material for four hundred pages, I do not know.

So, Snort for Dummies gets the lowest rating I can give: :1star:. Really–just read the manual.