Amazon.com: Hacking: Ultimate Hacking for Beginners, How to Hack (Hacking, How to Hack, Hacking for Dummies, Computer Hacking) eBook : Mckinnon, Andrew: Kindle Store

Wow. This book is amazing… and not in a good way. It is written as if by a 12-year-old, and not one who is a good student, either; if this were handed in to a middle-school teacher, it would come back with a poor grade. Many of the sentences in the book simply don’t make sense; sometimes you can guess the meaning, and sometimes you can’t. For example: “This therefore requires expertise thus making technology buff to actually call ‘hacking’ an ‘art’!” [p. 27]
In other places, the author fell asleep at the keyboard or something, for example on p. 30: “There are three types of Active attacks namely: * Masquerade attacks * Replaydata thatessage modification”. Um, what? Clearly something went wrong there. But it gets worse: if you keep reading, he goes on to describe FOUR active attacks (Masquerade, Replay, Message modification, and Denial of Service).
So not only is the author’s writing skill very poor, but it’s clear the book was not looked at by a copy editor. I think this must be a self-published book… it reads like somebody spent a weekend googling the topic, and then (poorly) wrote a report, and stuck it on Amazon.
Finally, it’s not just the quality of the writing (and complete lack of editing) that make this book suck. The information it contains (as far as I was able to stomach reading it, at least) ranges from trivial to just plain wrong. For example, on p. 8, this claim is made: “If you are hacking into a system just to quench your curiosity, it is fine.” This is a false and dangerous statement; whether you are hacking into a system without authorization, or breaking into a house or grocery store late at night, it is a crime (and a moral violation) whether you steal anything or not.
It’s remotely possible there’s some nugget of usefulness in here somewhere, and if it were the only book in the world on cybersecurity, I guess I would muscle my way through it looking for those rare tidbits. But it’s not, so my copy is headed to the recycling bin. Don’t be fooled by the suspiciously large number of glowing 5-star reviews here… and don’t waste your money or your time on this painfully written book.