How to read more security + engineering books
Ever since I wrapped up writing my own book back in 2021, I’ve been trying to learn more broadly about other domains in security and software engineering.
A lot of the learning came from ad-hoc googling, but I feel like one of the best ways to gain a solid foundation of a topic is to read a well-written book. So in this post, I’d like to share what I learned about reading technical books and how to learn more from books with less time and money.
Affording technical books
First of all, one of the issues I ran into when trying to read more technical books was gaining access to the books that I wanted to read. Technical books are really expensive — averaging somewhere around 50–100 USD per book.
O’Reilly subscription
To work around this issue, I got an O’Reilly learning subscription (https://learning.oreilly.com/home/). It’s a learning platform subscription that gives you access to a large library of technical books. Bug bounty bootcamp for example, is available through O’Reilly. Although the O’Reilly catalog is extensive, it doesn’t include a lot of new publications, books that are from smaller publishers, and books that are not purely technical.
