Great New Products: Mitnick and Make:

Robert Scoble recently asked me “what books are you most excited about seeing customers react to?” I’ll do my best to highlight these in the coming months, including products from Wiley as well as other publishers.

The first book I’d like to feature here is the new one from Kevin Mitnick: The Art of Intrusion. My group was fortunate enough to publish Kevin’s previous book, The Art of Deception, a couple of years ago. This new title (published last month) is off to a great start and is currently on the bestseller lists at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Why am I so anxious to see customer reaction to this one? Kevin Mitnick has a large fan base and his first book was an enormous hit. The Art of Deception explained how to gain someone’s trust through the use of social engineering. The Art of Intrusion goes behind the scenes covering the exploits of other hackers over the last several years. These hackers were willing to share the details of their stories with Mitnick, primarily because of who he is and their respect for him.

I’m about halfway through the book and have found it to be one of those page-turners you don’t want to put down. My favorite story so far is one about a couple of convicts in Texas who not only managed to secretly network a series of computers inside a prison, but also obtained dial-up access to the Internet. I couldn’t help but picture the bumbling guards from one of my favorite movies, The Shawshank Redemption…

Sure, I’m biased. After all, it’s one of the high visibility books published by my group this year. To balance things out, I’d also like to highlight a great new product from O’Reilly: Make: magazine.

Make: is an interesting experiment aimed at the hobbyist or technology do-it-yourself crowd. I took at look at their premiere issue a couple of weeks ago and loved it. It’s chock full of step-by-step projects and hacks for all sorts of gadgets. As you may have read in one of my earlier posts, I see a lot of opportunities with the hobbyist crowd. Make: magazine will undoubtedly be a hit in this segment.

It’s available either direct from O'Reilly or exclusively on Amazon (till 3/15) and it appears that they plan to start off with 4 issues per year. I’m assuming that if the subscription base builds they’ll look at turning it into a monthly product. At $34.95 for a one-year subscription it’s not exactly cheap. But, I was impressed with how rich the content was in the first issue – if they deliver the same quality in the future it’s worth every penny. Congratulations to O’Reilly for creating yet another new and exciting product!

 

Comments

[Blaine Moore]

I got a copy of the premier issue, and enjoyed it quite a bit also. There were only a couple of projects that I could see myself doing, and neither in the near future.