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Présentation : The CEIC Conference is going on as I write this, and Suzanne Widup's author panel went on yesterday. I'm not at the conference, so like many others, I live vicariously through what gets Tweeted about the conference, as well as about specific portions of the conference, such as the panel. I saw a question posted to Twitter, in which the tweeter asked, for the panel, why not self-publish like RTFM My initial thought was, you need to consider the members of the panel and the books they've written or co-authored those titles really don't lend themselves too well to a format similar to RTFM, which, in some cases, is described as a collection of notes and tips bound into a book. For example, I don't think I could see Hacking Exposed Computer Forensics in a format similar to RTFM. As such, the question is essentially an apples-to-oranges comparison. While self-publishing definitely has it's place, but may not always the best option for the material, nor for the author. But that doesn't mean that there aren't publishing possibilities out there that would be very well suited to a format similar to RTFM. I've addressed this topic before, but it is a good question, and certainly bears addressing. Essentially, the choice of whether to go with a publisher or to self-publish comes down to how much time and effort you do want to invest in getting the book published...at least, that's my perspective. Other perspectives might be about what the author gets out of it, or how much someone has to pay for the book. Writing a book is tough enough as it is...having someone there to do some of those things that need to be done i.e., formatting, illustrations, copy editing, printing, etc. in order for the book to be available to others means that the author can focus time and effort on writing the book, and not have to stop and figure out how get something done, or find a resource. A friend of mine told me that her husband publishes CDs for his band on his own, rather than going through a production firm. That means that he does everything himself in some cases this makes perfect sense. In others, such as writing a DFIR book, maybe not so much. Most of us don't like to write as it is if you self-publish, would you have someone review your materials for grammar, consistency, and technical accuracy If so, would it be someone you pay for that service Where's that money going to come from How will you handle illustrations or figures As such, consider this... if self-publishing were the sole route available, we'd likely have far fewer books available in the DFIR field. Or, maybe another way to put it is that if self-publishing really were that easy, we'd have more books. In the years that I've been involved in writing books, I've seen a fairly good number of folks start down the road and not make it very far, for a variety of reasons. In some cases, it's due to the realization that there's much more to writing a book than simply having an idea. When the publisher comes back and gives you a bunch of forms to fill out, and requests a market analysis and a detailed outline, with a swag on a word count, the reality of the situation becomes readily apparent. I've seen people stop there. I've also seen one instance where the author got past the point of signing a contract, and the publisher came back later and modified the contract, almost doubling the word count for the final manuscript, but made no other changes to contract, including the delivery date. The author simply walked away. I've read a number of the reviews for RTFM, and to be honest, the book sounds like a fantastic idea it was apparently originally intended to be an accumulation of someone's notes to be passed on to their team. In the right hands, something like that can be extremely useful, and I can relate when I was in grad school in '95-ish, I taught myself Java programming and relied heavily on O'Reilly's ...in a Nutshell books for tips and guidance. I found it very useful, because I wasn't looking for the basics of programming, and the basics of Java programming to be explained to me...I just wanted the bare bones stuff, with no fluff. Material that might be better suited to an RTFM-like format might be something like what's found here. Self-publishing simply isn't for everyone...the audience for a book like this is pretty limited. I can see books like this for using other tools, but I think that one of the strengths of RTFM is that there's the base assumption that anyone purchasing the book is familiar with both operating at the command line, and with Linux. While there are certain segments of the DFIR community that would strongly suggest that that's exactly how it should be, the fact is that this is far from reality. Resources Self-publishing a book 25 things you need to know - I strongly suggest that you read them all Lulu.com - self-publishing company How to self-publish - a guide, with pictures






Les derniers articles du site "Windows Incident Response" :

- Training Philosophy
- Cool Stuff, re WMI Persistence
- Windows Registry Forensics, 2E
- Event Logs
- Links Plugin Updates and Other Things
- Tools, Links, From the Trenches, part deux
- From the Trenches
- Updated samparse.pl plugin
- The Need for Instrumentation
- Analysis

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