Simple Steps to Data Encryption: A Practical Guide to Secure Computing 1st Edition

Of the many books that author Pete Loshin has written in the past decades, a number of them are completely comprised of public domain information that he gathered. Titles such as Big book of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) RFCs, Big Book of IPsec RFCs, Big Book of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) RFCs, and others, are simply bound copies of publicly and freely available information.In two of his latest books Practical Anonymity: Hiding in Plain Sight Online and Simple Steps to Data Encryption: A Practical Guide to Secure Computing, Loshin doesn't do the wholesale cut and paste like he did from the RFC books, but on the other side, these titles do not offer much added information than the reader can otherwise get online.The software tools detailed in the books are open source tools; and the open source community has done a fantastic job of not only making the software free, but creating documentation that is also free and rivals commercial technical guides.In Simple Steps to Data Encryption: A Practical Guide to Secure Computing, Loshin attempts to provide an overview of why you need encryption, and how to use it. The book barely succeeds at doing that, but there are certainly other titles that do it either more articulately or at least without charging for it. In addition, the book seems like it was rushed to print, and could have used a better technical editor.In fact, the book starts with an overview of how to use GnuPG (Gnu Privacy Guard). And like Tor, there are numerous free references at the GnuPG documentation site that provide many useful references.At $30-, this book provides very little added value to the free online documentation.

Peter Loshin's Simple Steps to Data Encryption (Syngress, ISBN: 9780124114838) contains just under 100 pages, but those pages are easy to read and contain a lot of useful information. The book focuses primarily on GnuPrivacy Guard (GnuPG) and how to use it to protect data in motion. But it also teaches about cryptography and encryption addressing issues such as generating and managing public keys, key servers, signatures, and even encrypting data at rest using FDE on modern operating systems.The book is framed as a story about Bob, who lives in a mythical country named Sylvania and has reasons to keep sensitive data from prying eyes. As the story unfolds, Bob learns how to use GnuPG to encrypt and protect his data.Although it is not really for those who already possess a firm knowledge of cryptography, Simple Steps to Data Encryption offers a nice introduction to the topic in an approachable and easy to digest manner.