// Prerequisites
What to read before The Practice of Network Security Monitoring
If The Practice of Network Security Monitoring feels too steep at intermediate level, here is what to read first. Lighter books in the same topics that build the prerequisites this one assumes.
01 · 2013
Applied Network Security Monitoring
A practitioner's walkthrough of building an NSM capability end to end, from deciding what to collect through detection and the analysis workflow that ties it together. The tooling is dated, but the way it teaches you to think about monitoring is not.
Intermediate4/5Chris Sanders, Jason Smith02 · 2017
Network Security Through Data Analysis
Michael Collins on building situational awareness from network telemetry: collection architecture, statistical baseline-setting, and the analytic patterns that turn raw flows into detection.
Intermediate4/5Michael Collins03 · 2017
Practical Packet Analysis
Chris Sanders' working manual for Wireshark, geared at troubleshooting and incident response rather than abstract protocol theory. Updated for Wireshark 2.x.
Beginner4/5Chris Sanders04 · 2019
Foundations of Information Security
Jason Andress' compact tour of the field: confidentiality / integrity / availability, identification and authentication, network and OS controls, written for newcomers and adjacent disciplines.
Beginner4/5Jason Andress05 · 2021
How Cybersecurity Really Works
Sam Grubb's gentle, exercise-driven introduction for non-specialists who need a working mental model of attacker behaviour and basic defence.
Beginner4/5Sam Grubb06 · 2007
Linux Firewalls
Michael Rash, author of psad and fwsnort, on building and operating Linux-native packet filtering and intrusion-response tooling. Pre-nftables in detail but conceptually durable.
Intermediate4/5Michael Rash07 · 2017
Zero Trust Networks
Evan Gilman and Doug Barth's pre-marketing-bubble treatment of zero-trust architecture — what it is when you actually implement it (trust evaluation, device identity, dynamic policy) versus what the vendor pitch turned it into.
Intermediate4/5Evan Gilman, Doug Barth08 · 2009
Nmap Network Scanning
Written by Nmap's own author, this is both a gentle introduction to port scanning and the definitive reference for every flag, timing knob, and NSE script the tool ships with.
Beginner4/5Gordon Fyodor Lyon