Information Security: Protecting the Global Enterprise

Author: Donald L. Pipkin, Donald Pipkin List Price: $44.99 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0130173231 Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR (May, 2000) Edition: Paperback Sales Rank: 148,925 Average Customer Rating: 4.17 out of 5

Buy now directly from Amazon.com -

Customer Reviews

Regardless, I really liked the book! Recommended reading.

Pipkin writes in an easy to understand style without a lot of arcane acronyms or techno speak.

The book has a good step-by-step approach and is a very good starting point for those looking to design their information systems security architecture.

The book is a great place to start ones security roadmap and initiative and as a launching point for more in depth work.

p. 112: "Access should allow anyone who is authorized, anywhere, information can be safely distributed, at any time."

This is either an incomplete sentence or a run-on sentence.

p. 114: "Notes in user manuals may include useful, even passwords."

This is apparently an incomplete sentence.

p. 116: "Security policies are enforced uniformly throughout a security domain. It interacts with other security domains at access points."

Because the verb "are enforced" has no subject, we are left to assume that the referent of the pronoun "it" in the second sentence is "security domain."

p. 116: "A domain of trust is part of a security domain that supports a common trust model..."

Does the clause beginning with "that" modify "security domain", as indicated by the position of the clause in the sentence? Or should it modify "part", which should then probably be "the part"? Who knows for certain?

p. 117: "Switches only transmit a packet to the particular device for which it is addressed."

This is only one of many sentences in which the author misplaces the delimiter "only".

It should probably be placed before "to the particular device". By the way, shouldn't a packet be addressed "to" a device, rather than "for" a device?

p. 122: "Any specific user should have only one identifier, even if the user performs multiple roles in the organization. This simplifies the association of individual identity for both the user and for the information system. It simplifies management and issuance of identifiers and reduces confusion in tracking the user and controlling which resources he or she uses.
There must be a one-to-one relationship between the individual and the identifier. This allows for individual accountability and ensures..."

To which referents in the above passage does the indicative pronoun "this" in sentences two and five point? To which referent does the pronoun "it" in sentence three point?

p. 123: " The use of holograms, which are difficult and expensive to reproduce, are widely used."

This sentence, in its simplest subject-predicate form, reads: "The use are used."

Add to this the penchant of this writer, as is true with many writers in the field of information systems, to expand an abbreviation only the first time it is used and then to use the abbreviation forever after as if it were a word. This practice forces the student who is new to the field of information security to pause every time he encounters the unfamiliar abbreviation to recall what it means.

Many of the errors in grammar and syntax that I have pointed out are relatively minor and can be overcome with a little reflection. The cumulative effect of so many errors, however, is a text that is an obstacle to understanding.

We all know that much software in use today is full of bugs. When we examine how writers in the field of information systems use the language that they have been studying since birth, however, we understand why so much software is flawed. It seems that many writers on topics related to computer consider close to be good enough. It just seems odd to me, though, in the age of software designed specifically to check for grammatical errors.

Similar Products