Puzzles for Hackers [With CDROM]

This book is a great book for hard core computer geeks, or a seasoned techie wanting to keep their brain young. Tons of challenging puzzles (some easy, some insanely hard) and thankfully an answer guide, some of these things are really tough, and I believe even if you cheat, you could really learn a lot and put your brain through some hoops. This book says Puzzles for hackers" It does mean computer hackers, If you consider yourself a hacker of something not directly computer related, this book isn't for you. Great book, recommend it for any geek who wishes to keep their brain young.

This book has some very interesting and unique puzzles; I've never actually seen a puzzle book with this kind of focus or attitude before. The puzzles contained within aren't "find the secret number" or "rearrange these some special way" type things; they're hard-core hacker puzzles, bending your mind and testing your knowledge. The examples given are often interesting, involving fake or real programs. The Cryptanalysis section starts with the fictitious Cool Crypto program; while the Net section brings up tools like tcpdump. One of the puzzles even involves cracking a password hidden in a Web page; but that page is encrypted using the real-world "HTML Protector" product which you first have to reverse engineer to get to the source code for the page. Some of the puzzles are also purely theoretical, and can be carried out by anyone with a good understanding of basic discrete math. Not only was I extremely pleased with some of the puzzles I could solve; but also with the solutions section of the book. Even though sometimes its solutions were over-presumptuous and limited to the exact scenario in the book, it did provide some "oh damn I hadn't thought of that" moments. It also provided valuable knowledge; some of the puzzles I just didn't know, so I looked in the solution section to see how it worked and learned something interesting. This book only seemed to display two major faults. First, sometimes the puzzles are too hard or just require knowledge you may not possess; for example, the Windows puzzles require an understanding of trivial and not typically important components of legacy DOS systems, or of the NTFS file system. Second, sometimes the solutions are too simple and limited; such as with some of the Cryptography puzzles where the answers make assumptions specific to the encrypted text, as opposed to showing a deeper method for analyzing the ciphertext to recover the key. All in all, anyone with a strong background in computer science and an interest in puzzles will likely find this book both challenging and fun. The puzzles put your computer science skills to the test, mathematically and analytically; they are a fresh change from crossword puzzles and simple cryptograms.

The book gathers together a disparate and funky collection of programming tidbits and trivia. Only some of these are actually coding problems. For example, in one section it asks if you recognise certain trademarks or marketing diagrams that were used in the recent past. The reverse engineering chapter might be an eye opener of what can be deduced from an executable, by using a good tool like SoftIce. For many programmers, there should be something new in this book.