Here is your decoder ring for O'Reilly "Animal" titles:
"Learning..." For beginners
"Programming" For intermediate-level
"Mastering" For advanced-level books
The "animal" books have the line-art drawings of animals on them. O'Reilly has other series, including books on general audience topics. There might be other key words indicating the level of the book if it isn't a programming book, but that's the nomenclature behind Programming Android
Or, a reminder that if you want change, you have to educate.
Actually, in a gold rush, the very best thing for most individuals is to be among the first to start digging. Profits from shovel selling (and book publishing) are marginal.
I'm really glad Andreas is writing this book, should be a great way for more developers to get involved. Crypto-currencies are unfortunately still a little too arcane and books like these help maturation.
That does sound a bit high, they should have media mail from USPS as an option, it's pretty much the cheapest way to ship books. Shipping 1lb is about $3, and material should be at max $1. They should easily be able to ship a book for around $4.
It's a pre-order and scheduled for August. Sometimes <cough>massively and all the time</cough> book schedules slip. When Amazon lists it it is probably in editing.
I find it hard to tell what will happen with Bitcoin tomorrow, much less in 5 months... I am under the impression that there's a decent chance that by August, the Bitcoin story will be a great story to write a novel about. I guess there is also the chance that it will evolve and achieve some level of legitimacy. But for that to happen, a lot needs to happen between now and then, and I find it hard to believe that a book announced now will include that part of the story.
I used O'Reilly books extensively 10-25 years ago, but I have found them (and pretty much all other printed technical books) out of date too quickly in the last 5-10 years for them to be useful for technical stuff, and Bitcoin is evolving faster than even most things in the tech world.
If you're interested in learning more about the technical operation of bitcoin, or if you're building the next great bitcoin killerapp or business, you will find this book essential reading. From the basic use of a bitcoin wallet to buy a cup of coffee, to running a bitcoin marketplace with hundreds of thousands of transactions, or collaboratively building new financial innovations that will transform our understanding of currency and credit, this book will help you engineer money. You're about to unlock the API to a new economy. This book is your key.
I hope this book has a very thorough section on securing your app, because that's probably the biggest problem that you'll face.
Andreas is the CSO of Blockchain.info, a site which takes client security seriously enough that they never touch their client's private keys, rather than "handing out IOUs to their users"; maybe we'll see a rise in adoption of this approach.
They've had some pretty horrible mistakes with respect to security though (before Andreas' time though, so no reflection on him), and the basic model of a web wallet is inherently broken...
A KDF is meant to slow down dictionary attacks by introducing a lot of computation. Normal values might be in the hundreds of thousands, even millions to bring the computation time down to less than a few a second on extremely high powered GPUs. 20 rounds has so little impact it's astonishing they even bothered to load the KDF library. Attacking encrypted files like this would be very fast for a motivated person, and when we know there's magic internet money involved there's a lot of motivated people.
doing 20 rounds in a browser represents a non-trivial amount of work. that's much better than nothing, as it helps defeat existing rainbow tables. iirc, 1000 rounds will take a
however as you suggest, on the server side, I would expect them to use a much higher 10k or so round count.
They left people's wallets with "aliases" open to be cracked by anybody who found them for years, messed up their RNG and revealed some users private keys, a few XSS mishaps, and their support reset 2FA keys for hackers with social engineering.
a.k.a. they made mistakes and then remedied the problem quickly without much controversy. Sounds like the opposite of another trading firm that just collapsed.
These sound like mistakes that many beginner companies can easily make when trying to craft them. Why is there a demand for perfection out of the gate? And why are offers to remedy the situation not given the same kudos?
Blockchain is just a wallet though. Many use cases (e.g. exchanges) require a trusted third party to be in control of the coins. I agree that there is no reason to hold coins if your use case doesn't absolutely require it.
It brings the price down from $29.99 to $17.99, but also takes away free shipping so YMMV.
And if you're interested in some more details about the book, here an outline that was posted a while ago:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KKV_VEmGPsPr74rFhhpqmdkF...