Ending Spam from Mr. Zdziarski is a well written BASIC and easy to
understand INTRODUCTION to get a technical overview of todays spam
fighting solutions on the market.
Also it is written on the cover that it is f.e focused towards
developers, network admins etc. I would consider the target customer to
be IT Managers, or other curious people who want to get an overview.
Thats what it does and it does it very well in my eyes.
The book provides simplified, abstract overviews of some available spam filters solutions.
The book is provided into 3 parts
- An Introduction part to spam filtering (Chapter 1-4)
- A part describing "Fundamentals of Statistical Filtering" (Chapter 5-9)
- an the third part describing "Advanced Concepts of Statistical Filtering" (Chapter 10-14)
Its a bit confusing that Chapter 4 has the same title than Part II. So perhaps Chapter 4 should have been part of "Part II" ?
The Chapters which I found most interesting were:
Chapter 4 "Fundamentals of Statistical Filtering"
Chapter 7 "The Low down dirty Tricks of spammers"
Chapter 9 "Scaling in Large Environments"
I am sure the author could have easily filled the book with Chapter
7 alone. The book is very entertaining and has a nice motivating
writing style. You might at times find some rant about the spammers
which I have chosen to ignore as it doesnt contain any valuable
information or anything which I didnt know already. While I might agree
to some of the authors views, I believe that the rant does
unfortunately do exactly the opposite in my eyes and does give spammers
credit to how they do their work.
I personally was actually looking for a companion book to "The Book
of Postfix" to help me further explore new anti spam technology.
I was hoping to find overview charts, being able to compare
different solutions,features, (dis)advantages. So in this sense, I was
actually looking for workshop style instructions, tuning advice,
troubleshooting advice etc.
The authors does explain f.e (Chapter 14) Collaborative Algorithms
but he does not go into detail which products support the feature and
how to perform the setup. He does provide some weblinks in his book
from which the interested reader might further investigate the topic.
From reading the Chapter10 on "Testing Theory" its easier to
conclude why the author doesnt go into more detail. If he would have
done so, the book could have been easily 2-3 times the size.
I assume, this is partly due to the fact that the anti spam technology /products/market is still fairly young .
Summary:
"Ending Spam" gives a very BASIC INTRODUCTION to the current
available Anti spam technology and some chosen products. After you have
read the book you have a first vague idea what type of solutions exist.
You will actually need other books to intensify the "knowledge" you
have gained here.
The fact that the book is written in simple terms makes it easily
acessable for a wide market, however if you are a technichian you will
perhaps find that the book just doesnt contain enough "meat" for you.
I would still recommend the book for Managers which need to know
only the rough details, beginners, or a first time read for newcomers.
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