Odd book. Not quite what I expected. If you're looking for a reference on how to tie one of the various mentioned tools into a C# project yourself, it will have a potentially useful starter at least. Other than that, the specific sections could use a bit more fleshing out to be useful alone and all together, it's an odd combination.

Structurewise, the first section of the book was odd. Basically a tutorial of C#, but only a limited subset of functionality, chosen oddly. Then a number of web related things. Sure. Weird, but fair enough. Then we have SQL injections and XSS, which are discussed in more depth other places. Yes, this book ties them to C#, but it's string processing. Nothing super specific to any particular language there.

After that, we have about half the book dedicated to several specific tools. They either had C# APIs or one would have to either call to a REST API or make native calls. All of these are interesting, but they don't actually get into details on how to use a specific tool, rather setting up using it with C# / .NET. But this all feels like it should have just been wrapped in a library, so that the user doesn't necessarily need the details. So it goes.

One we get to Chapter 13 though, that's a bit more interesting (and more relevant to C#) since it talks about decompiling. It's really only a tool reference though, although a pure code disassembler when you aren't on Windows is handy.

Then we're back to a weird feeling chapter on registry keys. Interesting, but not too deep.

I think (unfortunately), the most memorable thing about this book was the ❶ ❷ ❸ ❹ ❺ numbered circles. I guess so far as ways to refer to the code in a book (rather than a website with on hover text), it works. It's just very distracting.

Perhaps not the best book for a someone interested in security, but it did serve to remind me how much I liked .NET and C# when I last used them. I should dust off those projects at some point. So yay for that! ( )