A Writer's Reference with 2009 MLA and 2010 APA Updates 10.20

A Writer’s Reference is the most widely adopted college handbook ever published. The new edition is available in a classic version that provides more help with academic writing, serves a wider range of multilingual students, and lends more support for college research — all in an easy-to-use quick-reference format. Now for all the ways you teach your course, you can choose the classic version or choose from among 4 additional versions with varied content.

• A Writer’s Reference with Exercises is tailor-made for classroom use or for additional grammar practice with 86 integrated exercise sets.
• A Writer’s Reference with Writing in the Disciplines provides help for college writing beyond composition with advice and models in six academic disciplines.
• A Writer’s Reference with Writing about Literature includes an entire tabbed section on interpreting and writing about works of literature, with two annotated student essays.
• A Writer’s Reference with Extra Help for ESL Writers includes an entire tabbed section for nonnative speakers of English; it offers targeted advice and strategies for college writing and research.

About the Author

DIANA HACKER's handbooks, used at almost half of the colleges and universities in the country, are the most widely adopted in America. A member of the English faculty at Prince George's Community College in Maryland for almost 35 years, Diana Hacker personally class-tested her handbooks with nearly four thousand students. Diana Hacker's other handbooks, all published by Bedford/St. Martin's, include The Bedford Handbook (2006); Rules for Writers (2004); andA Pocket Style Manual (2004).

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS

NANCY SOMMERS, who has taught composition and directed composition programs for thirty years, now teaches writing in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. A two-time Braddock Award winner, Sommers is well-known for her research and publications on student writing. Her recent work involves a longitudinal study of undergraduate writing. Nancy Sommers is co-author of Fields of Reading, Ninth Edition (2010) for Bedford/St. Martin’s.

TOM JEHN teaches composition and directs the writing across the disciplines program at Harvard University. A recipient of numerous teaching awards both at Harvard and at the University of Virginia, he also leads professional development seminars on writing instruction for public high school teachers through the Calderwood Writing Fellows Project.

JANE ROSENZWEIG, a published author of fiction and non-fiction, teaches composition and directs the writing center at Harvard University. She has also taught writing at Yale University and the University of Iowa.

MARCY CARBAJAL VAN HORN, assistant professor of English and ESL at Santa Fe Community College (FL), teaches composition to native and nonnative speakers of English and teaches the Advanced ESL Writing course. She has also taught university-level academic writing and critical thinking at Instituto Technológico y de Estudios Superiores in Mexico.

EDITORIAL ADVISERS:
Of the more than 500 experienced composition instructors who reviewed the new edition, a core group served as an editorial advisory board — carefully reviewing all new material in depth, making sure the book would work as well for their students as it always had.
Joanne ADDISON

University of Colorado, Denver

Derick BURLESON
University of Alaska, Fairbanks

Paige BYAM
Northern Kentucky University

Elizabeth CANFIELD
Virginia Commonwealth University

Richard CARR
University of Alaska, Fairbanks

Michele CHEUNG
University of Southern Maine

Jon CULLICK
Northern Kentucky University

David ENDICOTT
Tacoma Community College

Lin FRASER
Sacramento City College

Hank GALMISH
Green River Community College

Nancy GISH
University of Southern Maine

Jacqueline GRAY
St. Charles Community College

Barclay GREEN
Northern Kentucky University

Karen GROSSWEINER
University of Alaska, Fairbanks

D. J. HENRY
Daytona Beach Community College

Kandace KNUDSON
Sacramento City College

Tonya KROUSE
Northern Kentucky University

Tamara KUZMENKOV
Tacoma Community College

Cheryl LAZ
University of Southern Maine

Lydia Lynn LEWELLEN
Tacoma Community College

Jeanette LONIA
Delaware Technical and Community College

Walter LOWE
Green River Community College

Michael MACKEY
Community College of Denver

Tammy MATA
Tarrant County Community College

Holly MCSPADDEN
Missouri Southern State University

Liora MORIEL
University of Maryland, College Park

Patricia MURPHY
Missouri Southern State University

Melissa NICOLAS
University of Louisiana, Lafayette

Diane Allen O’HERON
Broome Community College

Sarah QUIRK
Waubonsee Community College

Ann SMITH
Modesto Junior College

Steve THOMAS
Community College of Denver

Nick TINGLE
University of California, Santa Barbara

Terry Myers ZAWACKI
George Mason University

Click here to find out more about the 2009 MLA Updates and the 2010 APA Updates.

The Web Application Hacker's Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Flaws 09.34

The Web Application Hacker's Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Flaws. This book is a practical guide to discovering and exploiting security flaws in web applications. The authors explain each category of vulnerability using real-world examples, screen shots and code extracts. The book is extremely practical in focus, and describes in detail the steps involved in detecting and exploiting each kind of security weakness found within a variety of applications such as online banking, e-commerce and other web applications.

The topics covered include bypassing login mechanisms, injecting code, exploiting logic flaws and compromising other users. Because every web application is different, attacking them entails bringing to bear various general principles, techniques and experience in an imaginative way. The most successful hackers go beyond this, and find ways to automate their bespoke attacks. This handbook describes a proven methodology that combines the virtues of human intelligence and computerized brute force, often with devastating results.

The authors are professional penetration testers who have been involved in web application security for nearly a decade. They have presented training courses at the Black Hat security conferences throughout the world. Under the alias "PortSwigger", Dafydd developed the popular Burp Suite of web application hack tools.

"If you have an interest in web application security, I would highly recommend picking up a copy of this book, especially if you’re interested in being able to audit applications for vulnerabilities".
—Robert Wesley McGrew, McGrew Security

Reader'a Review :

This is the most important IT security title written in the past year or more. Why? Custom web applications offer more opportunities for exploitation than all of the publicized vulnerabilities your hear about combined. This book gives expert treatment to the subject. I found the writing to be very clear and concise in this 727 page volume. There is minimal fluff. While everything is clearly explained, this is not a beginners book. The authors assume that you can read html, JavaScript, etc... Usually with a book like this there are a few really good chapters and some so-so chapters, but that's not the case here. Chapters 3-18 in this book rock all the way through. Another huge plus is the tools in this book are free.

The first few chapters provide context and background information. Chapter 3 on Web Application Technologies provides particularly useful background info. The next 666 pages of the book are all about attacking the applications.

There next five chapters cover mapping application functionality, client side controls, authentication, sessions, and access controls. The coverage is comprehensive. I'm not new to these topics, but I learned so much in every chapter. The depth of coverage is amazing.

The next six chapters are the heart of this book. They cover injection, path traversal, application logic, XSS and related attacks, automating attacks, and information disclosure. You'll find full treatment of attacks we're all familiar with like SQL injection and cross site scripting as well as many that most of us haven't heard of before. The danger is real and these chapters need to be read.

The final next four chapters cover attacks against compiled applications, application architecture, web servers, and source code. The final two chapters are more useful as a quick reference. They provide an overview of the tools covered throughout the book and describe attack methodology discussed throughout the book for exploiting each technology.

This book scores five easily based on the relevance and value of the information.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition 09.18

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution , This 25th anniversary edition of Steven Levy's classic book traces the exploits of the computer revolution's original hackers -- those brilliant and eccentric nerds from the late 1950s through the early '80s who took risks, bent the rules, and pushed the world in a radical new direction. With updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zukerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak, Hackers is a fascinating story that begins in early computer research labs and leads to the first home computers.

Levy profiles the imaginative brainiacs who found clever and unorthodox solutions to computer engineering problems. They had a shared sense of values, known as "the hacker ethic," that still thrives today. Hackers captures a seminal period in recent history when underground activities blazed a trail for today's digital world, from MIT students finagling access to clunky computer-card machines to the DIY culture that spawned the Altair and the Apple II.

Amazon.com Exclusive: The Rant Heard Round the World
By Steven Levy

Author Steven Levy

When I began researching Hackers--so many years ago that it’s scary--I thought I’d largely be chronicling the foibles of a sociologically weird cohort who escaped normal human interaction by retreating to the sterile confines of computers labs. Instead, I discovered a fascinating, funny cohort who wound up transforming human interaction, spreading a culture that affects our views about everything from politics to entertainment to business. The stories of those amazing people and what they did is the backbone of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

But when I revisited the book recently to prepare the 25th Anniversary Edition of my first book, it was clear that I had luckily stumbled on the origin of a computer (and Internet) related controversy that still permeates the digital discussion. Throughout the book I write about something I called The Hacker Ethic, my interpretation of several principles implicitly shared by true hackers, no matter whether they were among the early pioneers from MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club (the Mesopotamia of hacker culture), the hardware hackers of Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club (who invented the PC industry), or the slick kid programmers of commercial game software. One of those principles was “Information Should Be Free.” This wasn’t a justification of stealing, but an expression of the yearning to know more so one could hack more. The programs that early MIT hackers wrote for big computers were stored on paper tapes. The hackers would keep the tapes in a drawer by the computer so anyone could run the program, change it, and then cut a new tape for the next person to improve. The idea of ownership was alien.

This idea came under stress with the advent of personal computers. The Homebrew Club was made of fanatic engineers, along with a few social activists who were thrilled at the democratic possibilities of PCs. The first home computer they could get their hands on was 1975’s Altair, which came in a kit that required a fairly hairy assembly process. (Its inventor was Ed Roberts, an underappreciated pioneer who died earlier this year.) No software came with it. So it was a big deal when 19-year-old Harvard undergrad Bill Gates and his partner Paul Allen wrote a BASIC computer language for it. The Homebrew people were delighted with Altair BASIC, but unhappy that Gates and Allen charged real money for it. Some Homebrew people felt that their need for it outweighed their ability to pay. And after one of them got hold of a “borrowed” tape with the program, he showed up at a meeting with a box of copies (because it is so easy to make perfect copies in the digital age), and proceeded to distribute them to anyone who wanted one, gratis.

This didn’t sit well with Bill Gates, who wrote what was to become a famous “Letter to Hobbyists,” basically accusing them of stealing his property. It was the computer-age equivalent to Luther posting the Ninety-Five Theses on the Castle Church. Gate’s complaints would reverberate well into the Internet age, and variations on the controversy persist. Years later, when another undergrad named Shawn Fanning wrote a program called Napster that kicked off massive piracy of song files over the Internet, we saw a bloodier replay of the flap. Today, issues of cost, copying and control still rage--note Viacom’s continuing lawsuit against YouTube and Google. And in my own business—journalism--availability of free news is threatening more traditional, expensive new-gathering. Related issues that also spring from controversies in Hackers are debates over the “walled gardens” of Facebook and Apple’s iPad.

I ended the original Hackers with a portrait of Richard Stallman, an MIT hacker dedicated to the principle of free software. I recently revisited him while gathering new material for the 25th Anniversary Edition of Hackers, he was more hard core than ever. He even eschewed the Open Source movement for being insufficiently noncommercial.

When I spoke to Gates for the update, I asked him about his 1976 letter and the subsequent intellectual property wars. “Don’t call it war,” he said. “Thank God we have an incentive system. Striking the right balance of how this should work, you know, there's going to be tons of exploration.” Then he applied the controversy to my own situation as a journalism. “Things are in a crazy way for music and movies and books,” he said. “Maybe magazine writers will still get paid 20 years from now. Who knows? Maybe you'll have to cut hair during the day and just write articles at night.”

So Amazon.com readers, it’s up to you. Those who have not read Hackers,, have fun and be amazed at the tales of those who changed the world and had a hell of time doing it. Those who have previously read and loved Hackers, replace your beat-up copies, or the ones you loaned out and never got back, with this beautiful 25th Anniversary Edition from O’Reilly with new material about my subsequent visits with Gates, Stallman, and younger hacker figures like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. If you don’t I may have to buy a scissors--and the next bad haircut could be yours!

Read Bill Gates' letter to hobbyists

About the Author

Levy is a senior writer for Wired. Previously, he was chief technology writer and a senior editor for Newsweek. Levy has written six books and had articles published in Harper's, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Premiere, and Rolling Stone. Steven has won several awards during his 30+ years of writing about technology, including Hackers, which PC Magazine named the best Sci-Tech book written in the last twenty years and, Crypto, which won the grand eBook prize at the 2001 Frankfurt Book festival.

Buy Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution Kindle Editions