This has never happened to me - but I have gotten a book from amazon with pages that've been torn near the top. Was a cheap book for an online college class so I didn't care to get a replacement.

I purchased this book from Amazon as well and I am having the same problem with the beginning of the book falling apart.  I have purchased many books from Amazaon and have never had this problem.  I'm about half way through and no other pages are showing signs of falling apart.

@DavidW my copy only has 2 "tabs" holding it in right now, at the bottom of the book

@partek happens.

My biggest worry at this point is getting another book from amazon with it doing the same thing.

I have 5 books from "Syngress", the editor of "Professional Penetration Testing".

It is funny, I too lost pages 1 to 8 from "Professional Penetration Testing"! The other 4 books are fine.

Humm, interesting...

Since I'm on vacation this week, I'll try pinging Syngress directly and see what they say, I'll pass them along to this thread so they can see it.

I'll let everyone know what happens.

(I remember when Steve Jackson Games came out with 4th ed. New binders, and the books literally fell apart. They gave everyone free replacement copies).

I've pointed the binding problem out to the folks at Syngress, hopefully they'll get it sorted out. If you contact them directly, they'll likely replace the books for you.

I'd like to bring up the fact that I took the official Heorot course run by the author of the book Professional Penetration Testing.

Has anyone else here taken this course, or is contemplating taking this course?

I received this book as a free gift upon signing up for the course. Overall, the course was a major let-down (for me anyway). Thomas Wilhelm (the author) has written a decent book, but his course doesn't hold water. He relies solely on free and open source distros and tools, then charges a pretty penny for the course access. What you get is a bunch of links to the freely down-loadable distros and Linux tools, you get to watch a few shoddy cam recordings made by the author, and then you are left on your own to challenge the De-Ice discs. Very sub-par offering from Wilhelm. Thus, I got my money back... this course is a major dud.

Now, as for the book, I thought this was a lot better than the course content, and offers decent walkthroughs of a professional pen-test, as well as useful tips and tricks. Not bad. So far, all pages are intent after an initial thumb-through.

I would be curious in hearing your guys' opinion on book and course.

Hungrymind