Your Personal Netspy

Rating: 4
Summary: Well, I think it's a useful book...
Comment: Some of the reviews below make me wonder if we are all talking about the same book, and if so, if some of the reviewers actually read it. Apparently either you like this book or you REALLY hate it, and I find the intensity of some reviewers' dislike rather puzzling. Did they think a $12.95 book was going to show them how to hack into the Pentagon's computers or something? The book gives a decent basic picture of Web privacy/security issues & information and provides a good basic toolkit of sites & resources in a concise and to-the-point format. It lists many sites with useful functions and services I had no idea even existed. Oh, and the jokes about Macs and "Independence Day" were pretty darn funny too. Yes, you can find some of the contents by using various free search engines, etc.; however, I'm willing to pay $12.95 to have someone find the sites and organize them for me so I can spend more time AT the websites rathe! r than searching for them. If the information in this book is so easy to find, perhaps the critics will write their own books about web search strategies for the rest of us. On the negative side, for $12.95 this book had a bit too much blank empty space on each page. The "hip hacker" or "cloak and dagger spy" attitude/theme of the book was also annoying. And yes, the authors could do a better job of pointing out which sites' services are not free--but hey, they never said that only free sites were listed either. In spite of these annoyances, average Internet users and aspiring hackers should still find this book interesting and useful.
Rating: 2
Summary: Informative but not worth buying
Comment: This book deserves a one-time run through for its interesting information, however, after the first perusal, it probably won't be taken off the shelf again. My best suggestion is to find a copy of it (or of a similar text) in the library
Rating: 4
Summary: A variety of resources in a convenient format.
Comment: It is nice to have all of the resources in the book collected into one place. It is true that you can find almost all of the information on the net, and some of it is pretty basic, but to have it summerized in one spot is nice. There are also a lot of sites you wouldn't want to miss. This book gets straight to the point and covers a lot of ground, but does not elaborate much and leaves this to the pages it points to. The advanced net user will probably be left with a feeling that something is missing.