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Would you recommend your book for someone with a rough understanding of how this works, but very light on detail?



In short, yes! But just to be 100% sure, I would encourage you to read the detailed table of contents (it's can be downloaded along the free first chapter from the book's homepage, in the right column: https://www.feistyduck.com/books/bulletproof-ssl-and-tls/ ).

One important point I would make is that my book doesn't dissect the protocols in detail. There is only one chapter (about 50 pages) dedicated to the protocol and I wanted to cover it at a level that virtually everyone will want to understand. If you want more than that, hundreds of pages won't be enough; in the end you will have to dive into the dozens of RFCs, and so on. What I do do, is point to those RFCs so that you at least know where to find the additional documentation. IIRC there are more than 600 links in the book and they can all be found here (automatically extracted from the DocBook XML manuscript): https://fsty.uk/bulletproof-ssl-and-tls

My realisation was that, in practice, actual protocol flaws are not the weakest link. Instead, there are hundreds of different problems everywhere in the ecosystem, so you need to look at the issues in the protocol, but also in the certification authorities and the certificate issuance process, SSL/TLS stacks, clients, browsers, servers, libraries, development and configuration practices, and so on. My book is thus very practical and examines all these aspects that you need to understand at at least some level if you want to use TLS.

BTW, please note that I will send you a free digital copy of the book if you buy the paperback _anywhere_ and send me the receipt. The benefit of the digital edition is that it's typically much more current than the paperback. In fact, the digital edition is fully up to date at the moment. I published a complete revision just yesterday.




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