Despite the title, Networking Personal Computers with TCP/IP only discusses DOS and Windows machines (there is nothing at all about Macintoshes, for example). I administer half a dozen of these, running Windows for Workgroups and using netBIOS over TCP/IP to connect to a Unix server running samba. Since most of Networking Personal Computers with TCP/IP deals with DOS, Windows NT, Netware, Windows 95, and PC-NFS (things not relevant to my situation) or with basic networking and TCP/IP (things I already have a decent grasp of), I did little more than skim its contents before passing it on. (I was particularly unhappy to find no mention of samba, since a Linux or FreeBSD box running samba is one of the cleanest and most efficient — and certainly the cheapest — ways to provide services to a network of PCs.) Networking Personal Computers with TCP/IP may be more useful for the administrator with a large, heterogeneous collection of DOS and Windows machines.

Computer Crime is aimed primarily at those who have to worry about the legal side of computer crime. As well as material on how to investigate and prosecute computer crimes, it includes a survey of laws concerning computer crime and 150 pages of actual excerpts — in small print — from US federal and state laws and those of a few other countries. I did little more than flick through most of this, but found some schematic guidelines for preventing computer crime (covering physical, personnel, communications and operations security) more interesting.

September 1995

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