Who Should Read This Book

I've usually found these "Who Should Read This Book" sections to be somewhat useless simply because the goal is to get you to think that you should read the book. Therefore, to satisfy the publisher I'll tell you that everyone should read this book. In fact, everyone should read this book multiple times, buying a separate copy each time.

In all seriousness, I can't tell you whether you should be reading this book, but I can tell you about the book.

This book assumes that you have already chosen a Linux distribution and that you've already installed it. This book also assumes that you're not looking for an introductory "HOWTO" on Linux or *nix security such as the chmod command. There are many great resources about those topics already, many of them on the Internet, and I feel as though coverage of those issues gets away from the focus of this book. However, this book does deal rather extensively with introductory material on network security, packet filtering, and the layers in the OSI model (if you're unfamiliar with the OSI model, it's explained in the book).

This book tries to be helpful to those who know nothing about firewalls as well as to those who know a bit about Linux and Linux security but want to carry that to the next level. This book could be used successfully by home users and enterprise security administrators alike.

To get the most out of this book, you should be comfortable with, or at least not afraid of, the Linux command line, or shell. You should know how to move about in the file system and perform basic shell commands.