Guide To Computer Forensics and Investigations - Standalone Book

The book was required for a college course. It is doing the job. We’re passing the class!

Very good condition

When I'm not under a deadline, I don't mind long chapters... But this book really puts the pressure on with 90 page chapters and have to do 2-3 a week. Doesn't work with other courses or having a job/living on your own with life chores. A lot of unnecessary information, like Linux guides and whatnot. Linux is useful, but rarely used anymore.

Very helpful. Just the right book for my Computer Forensics course.

Good Shape, great book

Interesting book

This textbook has been the bane of my existence for the past three months.This textbook teaches you how to do very technical and complicated things in computer forensics (at least if you are a beginner like me). It goes extremely in-depth in every chapter, so if you start to feel like you understand something, it pulls the rug right out from under you a few paragraphs later. In chapter 5, you go from learning about the anatomy of a hard drive to suddenly analyzing the raw hex of a file with tiny, tiny screenshots that you have to squint your eyes to attempt to read.If that was my only issue with the textbook I would not leave this review. The absolute WORST part of this text is the accompanying online course. This is where I have to resist going into expletives.I understand that it is difficult to convey procedures done on a computer through a textbook alone — thus, the accompanying online course was made. This includes labs and quizzes to use for practice. Okay, great.Every single time I do a lab I have to set aside at least 2 hours of my time, and I have to prepare for my day to be completely ruined. The labs use a VM — basically, you remotely connect to a computer in England which already has all of the software installed. However, their computers are absolute garbage. I spend half of my time waiting for the computer to load. Today I spent my entire lab with not a cursor but a blue spinning loading wheel.Also, the labs never explain why you’re doing anything, and sometimes they neglect to tell you how to do something that it really should. For example, in chapter 8, it tells you to use ProDiscover to search for the text string “FIF.” Cool, fine. Then suddenly it says, “Now navigate to cluster AC4.” Ok, how does this connect to searching for FIF? Why am I navigating to AC4 in particular? Are we just gonna pretend I never found the FIF string or what? What a waste of my time.THEN, I had a technical issue that I could not figure out. I tried and tried to fix it, but just could not stop the error from happening. So I sent in a help ticket to their support team. It’s been 3 days. 3 days is a LOT of time for a college student with upcoming assignments due. This is insane.If I could tell you to not buy this textbook I would, but sadly we are all just college students stuck in the cycle of buying expensive, horrible textbooks. If you planned on reading it for fun, don’t.

Most of the reviews here are either seller reviews or are complaining about the companion website. Here's one about the book's contents.This book is terrible. I have read a LOT of programming and computer science books, and this one definitely falls in the bottom 10% when it comes to quality.* The information is incredibly dated. There is some information on newer systems like Windows 10, but it also spends time talking about ancient things like DOS (!!!) and FAT-formatted floppy disks. I feel like the authors learned about Windows during the mid-late 90s Windows 3.1 / 95 & 98 / NT era and have only sporadically kept up to date with changes.* A lot of the information is vague or you are directed to external websites (usually via brittle-looking links) for information that really belongs in the book.* The vague, hand-wavy information is mixed in with a lot of highly detailed information about random topics. Sadly, there's usually not really a thorough enough treatment of these bits to make them useful. A book should either go deep on a subject or explain it superficially - not combine a weak description with a random selection of low-level trivia.* The exercises, particularly the case projects, are either trivial or busywork. Some are incredibly vague (check out case project 5-2 for an example). Many involve writing extensively about boring things like business and legal processes. God help you if your instructor assigns a lot of these (mine did).* The writing style is incredibly bland. You know how almost every textbook for a vocational-tech subject like automotive mechanics or welding has a couple of chapters at the beginning that talk about things like safety and government regulations? The entire book was written using that style and is about as interesting.To sum up, this book feels like it was phoned in by bad writers who learned about the subject decades ago. There's a little useful information here, sure, but it's buried in a pile of blandly-written, archaic dreck. If you are a student or looking for a self-study resource, I highly recommend you look elsewhere. If you are an instructor, please pick a different book.