Here you will find local copies or links to some excellent technical documentation on a variety of subjects.
Cryptography- Handbook of Applied Cryptography, Menezer et al - Authors Menezer, van Oorschot, and Vanstone were nice enough to release a digital copy of the 5th edition of their comprehensive textbook on cryptography. This book is easily on par with Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography. Be warned that this is not a book for beginners or people who are not comfortable with math. Dr. Menezer maintains a webpage for the text book which contains links to C implementations of the algorithms in the book.
- English Word List - a sorted, unique wordlist I have assembled from various sources over the years. Has ~ 3.5 million English words
- Art and Science of RS-485 - RS-485 is a master-slave serial communications protocol used by machinery, automation, and transactions systems. Interfacing to RS-485 isn't that difficult; most people simply don't know what RS-485 is. This document is a good introduction to people wanting to interface RS-485 systems they encounter
- A Simple Course on Microcontrollers - An excellent and lengthy file on understanding microcontrollers, and through them the modern microprocessor. It covers: binary numbers and operations, microcontroller hardware, Writing a simple operating system, interfacing keyboards and LCDs to microcontrollers, and much more. The file guides the reader in building a mini computer based around an Intel 8051. The finished product has a LCD screen, a keyboard, a serial port, primitive file system, a basic operating system, and more.
- Beej's Guide to Network Programming - Just about as straight forward as you can get. This is a tutorial available in many formats, on socket programming in C. It covers writing simple clients/servers, and more advanced topics like non-blocking I/O. If you don't have access to Steven's TCP/IP Illustrated series, this will get you started.
- The PageRank Citation Rank: Bringing order to the web - Larry Page's (the co-founder of Google) paper which describes PageRank, the system used by Google to evaluate the relevancy of webpages to search terms.
- Art of Unix Programming - Nice look at the design philosophies of writing programs for Unix: do one thing great, assume your program will be used as a filter for other programs, etc. The book is full of case studies of successful programs and what makes them great. File format and protocol design is also covered. finally, the book includes overviews of various programming languages, developer environments, and developer tools. Highly recommended!
- Black Book of Computer Viruses - While this book mainly references DOS viruses and is largely out of date, its a good way to understand how computers load and execute software. It also shows how integral knowledge of a computer's subsystems can lead to entirely new areas of research.
- IBM C Reference Guide - While K&R is the definitive guide for anyone interested in C, this guide from IBM is freely available. While it is more verbose than K&R, this guide covering all the same material and with the same level of detail.
- JavaScript Bootcamp - Wonderful presentation put together by Amy Hoy. Takes you through JavaScript primitives, user-defined objects, simulating name spaces, and other topics for fully utilizing JavaScript as more than a simple toy language.
- JavaScript Standard, 3rd Edition - Also known as ECMAScript, this is the language specification for Javascript. Very handly for learning the ins and outs of the langauge as defined by the spec, not bastardized by Microsoft. Think of it as the K&R for Javascript.
- Comparing Java and .NET Security - Two UVA computer security professors look at the security vulnerabilities found in the JVM vs. the CLR.
- RFPolicy 2.0 rfp's classic document that defined so-called responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities. A must for anyone in the computer security field.
- Smashing The Stack For Fun and Profit - Aleph1's grand work in Phrack 49 published in 1996 that rediscovered the buffer overflow for the masses. Over a decade later stack-based buffer overflows can still be found in commerical software, though they are largely being replaced by heap overflows.
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