Ajax Security is out and the feedback I'm getting is incredible.

Andrew van der Stock The Executive Director of OWASP reviewed a draft of Ajax Security and here is what he had to say about it:

If you are writing or reviewing Ajax code, you need this book. Billy and Bryan have done a stellar job in a nascent area of our field, and deserves success. Go buy this book.

Is it just a re-hash of old presentations? No. The book breaks some new ground, and fills in a lot of the blanks in all of our presentations and demos. I hadn’t heard of some of these attacks in book form before. The examples improved my knowledge of DOM and other injections considerably, so there’s something there for the advanced folks as well as the newbies.

I really liked the easy, laid back writing style. Billy and Bryan’s text is straightforward and easy to understand. They get across the concepts in a relatively new area of our field.

The structure flows pretty well, building upon what you’ve already learnt ...
there is advanced stuff, but the authors have to bring the newbie audience along for the ride.

Billy and Bryan spend a bit of time repeating the old hoary “no new attacks in Ajax” meme which is big with the popular kids (mainly because their products can’t detect or scan Ajax code yet and still want money from you), and then spend the rest of the book debunking their own propaganda with a wonderful panache that beats the meme into a bloody pulp and buries it for all time.

Web security guru dre offers up this review of Ajax Security:

It’s quite possible that many Star Wars Ajax security fans will be calling Billy Hoffman, the great “Obi-Wan”, and pdp “Lord Vader” to represent the “light” and “dark” sides that is The Force behind the power wielded by Ajax.

The book, Ajax Security, covered a lot of new material that hadn’t been seen or talked about in the press or the security industry. The authors introduced Ajax security topics with ease and provided greater understanding of how to view Javascript malware, tricks, and the aberrant Java... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Ajax Security Book Out! Awesome buzz!

I have consumed a massive amount of Red Bull in the last 2 weeks in a run up to finishing the manuscript for my Ajax Security book. We are talking on average 2-3 a day, with an occasional day of 4. Once there was a day of 5. Just once, and *never* again. At some point you can't really call them "days" anymore. A day is simply a convenient unit of 24 hours that may or may not start at 12:00am.

There is an elusive euphoria stage of Red Bull consumption where you are unbelievably productive and yet task that seemly take hours take only about 27 minutes or so. That was the odd thing. It always seemed 27 minutes later. I like to call this stage "Fry-Time" in reference to that Futurama episode where Fry drinks 100 cups of coffee and time slows to a crawl. Fry-Time occurs only in a narrow band on the line between total exhaustion and caffeine-induced heart attack and is a difficult stage to reach. I've hit Fry-Time maybe 3-4 times ever. 2 of those times have happened in the last 2 weeks.

Then, there is the "attention deficient disordering" stage. This stage occurs beyond Fry-Time and before the caffeine-induced heart attack phase. In this phase, you want to be productive. You are aware of all the work you need to accomplish as well as its importance. You feel motivated and excited about all your projects. In fact, it feels like you are in the Fry-Time stage. But you aren't. You are ADDing. Because as soon as you try to do something. You can't. Halfway through your brain jumps to thinking about another task and you stall. Its like OS scheduler that has so many jobs to do it spends all it time context switching instead of actually making any progress on any of them. This is an extremely frustrating phase because you know what's happening. And the very act of noticing that you are being scattered brained brings to mind all the tasks you still need to do which makes you think about how cool some of them are and suddenly you aren't doing any more work on whatever it was you were working on. You've context switched to another job.

The only thing to do in the ADD stage is wait it out and try to be productive later. The only problem is when you are in the ADD phase you have had so much Red Bull you can't sleep! So you are wide awake, too hyped to do anything, knowing you have shit to do, and losing time that you could be sleeping.

This is exactly what happened to me around 4:00am this morning. On an upside, I got through about 60 pages of Guns, Germs, and Steel. Elonka's cousin sure can write!

Taming the Bull