They Were Books

What educational resources were most valuable to me as a cybersecurity professional? 

They weren't videos or courses. They were books. Here is a list of few of them...

The Cuckoo's Egg, Cliff Stoll - How someone with no experience with computer security invented his own highly effective intrusion detection and response methods. 

TCP/IP Illustrated Volume 1: The Protocols, W. Richard Stevens - The most concise but highly readable summary of TCP/IP you'll find. A classic. Keep a copy on your desk. 

Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore - The bible of Silicon Valley product marketing strategy. I revisit this often.

A Short Course on Computer Viruses, Fred Cohen - The first book I ever read on what we now call malware. It's still a good primer, and it's a fun read. 

The Visible Ops Handbook, Kevin Behr and Gene Kim - A shortcut to ITIL, but also a primer on what would become dev/ops. I can't remember how many times I've presented Behr's and Kim's ideas to audiences. Great stuff. Easy to understand.

Sandworm, Andy Greenberg - The story of the beginning of the current era of cyber threats, at least as I see it.

Worm: The First Digital War, Mark Bowden (also the author of Black Hawk Down, I think) - Sort of a companion to Sandworm, Worm is about how a coalition of cybersecurity professionals around the world fought the Conficker worm.

Atomic Habits, James Clear James Clear - How I keep my life in order despite having neither willpower nor strength of character. The life hack to end all life hacks.  

Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail, John Gall - A pediatric dentist explains how everything is in a failure state all the time, yet those systems continue to work well enough. I consider this an antidote to cynicism. 

Agile Software Development with Scrum, Ken Schwaber - Scrum is a risk management approach to collaborating on small projects. Some may disagree, but that has been my experience. Schwaber's seminal work on Agile remains one of the best. 

The Design of the UNIX Operating System, Maurice J. Bach - The guts of the OS at the core of our world. 

The Tao of Network Security Monitoring: Beyond Intrusion Detection, Richard Bejtlich - Partially out of date, but a great intro to IDS.

Finite and Infinite Games, James P. Carse - Simon Synek cribbed this when he came up with this book on infinite games. It illuminates why we defenders hold the upper hand in the struggle against our adversaries.

Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening - A secular introduction to Buddhist thought and practice. 

The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, Slavoj Zizek - Occupy changed everything, including cyber. 2012 was arguably a more important year than 2001. Also a sort of primer to Zizek.

Weaving the Web, Tim Berners-Lee - How the WWW was born. Also the book that first turned me on to the works of Jorge Luis Borges.

The Aleph and Other Stories, Jorge Luis Borges - The best short stories ever written. After you've finished this one, read Borges' anthologies, Fictions and Labyrinths. Pay special attention to The Garden of Forking Paths and The Library of Babel. They're all great, though.

The Accidental Guerilla, David Kilcullen - On some of the origins of insurgency out of the basic need to feed, clothe, educate and protect one's family. To some degree, Kilcullen illuminates the perspective of our adversaries, or some of them anyway. His book on COIN is great too.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber - An anarchist anthropologist's view of money, banking, debt, and economics. Graeber was one of the greatest minds of my generation.

War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges - The book that shattered the myths I might have once believed about war. Life changing. If you think of cyber war as war, you won't after you have read Hedges' work.

Beautiful Evidence, Edward Tufte - His most enjoyable book on the graphical presentation of data and information. Beautiful indeed. Attend one of his courses live while you still can. They're truly breathtaking. They're also weirdly inexpensive. He could charge a lot more, but doesn't.

Get in the Van: On the Road with Black Flag, Henry Rollins - A book about learning to suffer well. Henry proves that talent is not nearly as important as sacrifice and raw effort.

After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Arthur Danto - Art is everywhere. It informs more of our lives than we are aware of. 

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn - Mostly about "normal science", Kuhn's book put the word "paradigm" into popular use. Study this one closely. Kuhn was not a scientist but rather a historian of science. It's profound but accessible. 

The Birth of Tragedy out of The Spirit of Music, Friedrich Nietzche - My favorite. All of Nietzche's real works are amazing. (I say "real", because The Will to Power is basically a forgery by his sister, a proto-Nazi.) 

Dummies Guides. Seriously, they're great.