Hi all,

I'm hoping to stimulate a little discussion here.  I see pretty frequent suggestions on this site for various penetration testing and hacking books, but not for many other security books.  I'm guessing that the members here read other security books too, so I ask:

What is your favorite non-hacking security book?

My favorite security book is Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World by Charlie Kaufman et. al.  The book focuses on network security protocols and has very lucid explanations of the cryptography involved, how the protocols work and what their shortcomings are.  It doesn't have a lot of practical advice for system admins, but it really helped me to understand Kerberos, IPSec, SSL, etc.

I really enjoy this one Incident Response and Computer Forensics, Second Edition.  I am rereading it right now to prepare for GCFA.  Another "Hacking" book I love reading is Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT.  Nightwork isn't technical at all but it has some great stories.  If anyone is interested you can read about a lot of the hacks here.

I was fortunate to come across a copy of The Cuckoo's Egg at a used bookstore a few years ago.  I thought it was very good; perhaps it even deserves a re-read.

I'll concede the StN series are good, some of the other technical-fiction books Syngress have put out are really quite bad* (good from a technical point and have got me thinking, but not the easiest of reads)

I'll n-th Cookoos Egg, I need to get hold of it again as I'd like another read of it.

* other opinions are available

Tao of Network Security Monitoring: Richard Bejtlich

File System Forensic Analysis: Brian Carrier

Snow Crash: Neal Stephenson - cause sometimes you just wanna read some ninja hacker cool science fiction...