"The book that you MUST READ
RIGHT NOW is the second edition of Ross Anderson's Security Engineering book.
Ross did a complete pass on his classic tome and somehow made it even
better..."
Gary McGraw
`If you're even thinking of doing any security engineering, you need to
read this book'
Bruce Schneier
Free chapters from
the second edition! Wiley has agreed to let me put six sample chapters
online for free. Here they are.
The rest of the book will appear online in due course - that is, when I can persuade the publishers to allow it. Meantime I hope you'll buy the paper version:
The first edition (2001)
You can also download all of the first edition for free:
The foreword, preface and other front matter
Following enquiries from blind students, Jose C. Lacal has contributed these MP3 files of preface, chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 6, and chapter 7.
My goal in making the first edition freely available five years after publication was twofold. First, I wanted to reach the widest possible audience, especially among poor students. Second, I am a pragmatic libertarian on free culture and free software issues; I think that many publishers (especially of music and software) are too defensive of copyright. (My colleague David MacKay found that putting his book on coding theory online actually helped its sales. Book publishers are getting the message faster than the music or software folks.) I expect to put the second edition online too in a few years.
If you own the first edition of my book, I hope you liked it enough to upgrade to the second edition. I also have online errata for the first edition here. These have all been applied to the second edition - but there's a lot of new material too. The book has gone up from about 640 pages to about 900.
There are reviews of the first edition, which was translated into Japanese, Chinese and Polish.
Return to Ross Anderson's home page