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Do you have any comments on it (or is it still a preorder)? I see we can't even have a peek on the table of contents.

By the way, HN, what would be your advise for a good technical book on "cracking". I mean, not a collection of ad-hoc recepies, but some generic knowledge, however something where you don't hesitate to open your gdb/wireshark/etc.. : for example I remember I enjoyed reading http://insecure.org/stf/smashstack.html a long time ago.

The industry standard answer to that question is "The Shellcoders Handbook", though I think you'd be better off with "The Art Of Software Security Assessment" and a lot of man pages.
+1 for TAOSSA. Fantastic reference.
I would get under the hood of metasploit and see where that takes you. Or read the old phracks. Even four years ago phrack was talking about inserting kernel modules without root perms. Neat stuff!
Permit me to geek out for a moment and point out that this trick goes back more than 10 years:

http://bit.ly/1kQu07

What's more, in 1996:

* amodload worked under the (then) closed-sourced SunOS

* it was written in SPARC assembly

* it shimmed its own kernel module loader through devkmem

It's basically the first real Unix virus. What's depressing is that almost everything it did was pedestrian for virus authors 5 years prior to it.

Great link! Thanks!
I'm taking a course right now in operating systems, a big section of which is on security. All of our required readings for this section have come from metasploit/phrack/insecure.
You can peek on Amazon, and it's $26 pre-order (available on 23rd, it seems?).

http://www.amazon.com/Gray-Hat-Python-Programming-Engineers/...

Shellcoders Handbook

Was one of the textbooks in my cs security undergrad course. Good overview, very technical, gdb will come into play.

Darn. Its not available in safaribooks.com yet either. It looks interesting, but I'd like to get a look at it before buying.
Looks as though there are many Windows specific chapters and not-so-many *nix chapters.
The state of the art in reversing is more advanced on Win32 than under Unix. Pretty much the only reason a normal person would break out assembly under Unix is if they're a toolchain developer, whereas direct x86 programming is part of Win32's cultural heritage.