Nessus Network Auditing: Jay Beale Open Source Security Series Paperback – 18 Oct. 2004

There are no other books on Nessus out there. This book still has a lot of relevant information regarding the internal working of Nessus that you cannot find anywhere.

First, it's old. Even if you're using the open source 2.x versions and not the commerical 3.x versions, you'll find the content to be a bit dated. Not a problem for the most part, as this book talks a lot about vuln scanning concepts and all that is still applicable. And the differences in GUI layout between the book and latest versions isn't hard to rectify just by clicking around a little. The age of the text is more of a problem in that it lacks discussions of current attacks.Second, a lot of the book just covers basics about vuln scans and using nessus. Sorry, but for the money I paid for this book, I'm not seeing the value that other reviewers are referring to. IMHO lots of this basic usage and intro stuff is covered in numerous online articles (some of which are linked from Tenable's website on the Nessus documentation page). Even topics like dealing with false-positives are covered pretty well in those resources.Granted, the reviews are generally from 2004 and 2005, and many of the articles I'm referring to were written after then. So maybe this book was really helpful at that time - but for anyone considering buying this book circa 2008 or later, save your money. Either wait for an updated edition or look at free resources online.As for the "lack of meat", this book just doesn't go deep enough. Again, I'm not getting much insight beyond what I already found online. I've gleaned some good tips, but again, not enough to justify the length (and cost) of this book.

I was looking for a low cost reference (used book) for Nessus. This looks like it will work.

ok