Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
Ethereal Network Protocol Analyzer Toolkit provides the reader with a completely integrated book and companion Web site to analyze network traffic using Ethereal, the world's most popular network protocol analyzer on Windows, Unix, and Apple OS X. This book covers everything from the fundamentals of protocol analysis, to analyzing real world malicious code to programming advanced protocol dissectors. The companion Web site for the book offers dozens of working tools and scripts created for this book. This book provides complete information and step-by-step Instructions for analyzing protocols and network traffic on Windows, Unix or Mac OS X networks. First, readers will learn about the types of sniffers available today and see the benefits of using Ethereal. Readers will then learn to install Ethereal in multiple environments including Windows, Unix and Mac OS X as well as building Ethereal from source and will also be guided through Ethereal's graphical user interface. The following sections will teach readers to use command-line options of Ethereal as well as using Tethereal to capture live packets from the wire or to read saved capture files. This section also details how to import and export files between Ethereal and WinDump, Snort, Snoop, Microsoft Network Monitor, and EtherPeek. The book then teaches the reader to master advanced tasks such as creating sub-trees, displaying bitfields in a graphical view, tracking requests and reply packet pairs as well as exclusive coverage of MATE, Ethereal's brand new configurable upper level analysis engine. The final section to the book teaches readers to enable Ethereal to read new Data sources, program their own protocol dissectors, and to create and customize Ethereal reports.

Rating : - At least they didnt say complete reference or definitive guide in the title
A good fourth of this book is spent telling you what a sniffer is... the rest of the book is pretty much just as useful, I think I found maybe a dozen snippets of useful information, wireshark is an excellent tool, especially for its ease in wireless settings, but this book is next to worthless, you can get most of what is in here from reading about nmap at [...], that is another sniffer, a much more powerful sniffer at that, but it does lack some wireshark functionality, and is unreliable for wireless captures. I gave this book 3 stars only because of its wireless chapter, I had quite a few questions about wireless sniffing and this books one chapter on it managed to answer a good many of them. On the plus side, this is a very easy to read book, and goes by very quick, mostly because it is just fluff and nonsense that anyone who even knows what a sniffer is would already know.