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Overpriced Kindle Edition Hides Text 
Eager to try out the Kindle application for the iPhone--as well as recently kicking a World of Warcraft addiction--I thought this would be a fun read. While the substance of the book itself is worthy of a separate review, I'd like to focus on the Kindle experience of this text.
The text features numerous sidebars: gray-background side topics tangentially related to the main text. However, on the Kindle for iPhone, the majority of these sidebars are truncated.
That is, their ends are chopped off.
For such an expensive ebook, I'd expect to get the complete text. Not so here.
Too General, not for a programmer 
As a programmer point of view, this book is useless. Before buying the book, I want to know how to debug a game, how to find NPC offset, and how to find functions used inside the game. This book is mostly about what is legal and what is not. I have learned nothing from this book.
The next wave of computer crime 
Online games are, as the term implies, video games played over the Internet. Many of them have associated online communities that reach well beyond the closed world of traditional single-player home games. The most popular, World of Warcraft, boasts more than 10 million players worldwide.
While the world of online gaming is built to entertain, its creators and players fight the same IT threats as business-oriented networks. Today's 12-year old who is hacking World of Warcraft simply to cheat at the game could, in a couple years, be targeting corporate networks to more nefarious ends.
While the game attackers' goals are different, this book demonstrates the lengths to which they are willing to go to access a system. Those tactics are likely forerunners of software and network security challenges to come in other online arenas.
In Exploiting Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems, authors Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw offer a look at those threats. The book's 10 chapters provide a comprehensive overview of everything from game hacking 101 to reverse engineering.
The authors explain in depth why and how online games are a harbinger of software security issues to come, and manifest some that already exist. They describe how gamers have created billion-dollar virual econ-omies, how to build a bot to play a game for you, why players cheat, and even how game companies invade players' personal privacy.
Most important, the authors describe how game creators overcome a security issue only to have it defeated by the hackers. Sound familiar? This never ending "Spy vs. Spy" scenario is obviously frustrating to the game creators and underscores the critical importance of building effective application security into the fabric of the game.
Both Hoglund and McGraw have written extensively on the importance of software security. The sooner you and your software developers read their most recent book, the better off your software infrastructure will be. Your software is critical to your organization; protect it as well as the gamers do.
Self Promoting Cut and Paste Mess
By the way, you can read more in my book . . .
If you want to know more, buy . . .
Discuss further in my book and every other book printed by my publishing company . . .
This book is a mess of poorly explained code snippets and self promotion. Also, it focues 90% of its hacking on WoW. If you don't know anything about World of Warcraft, then you will be completly lost. I have /timeplayed 1000 hours, so I could follow all of the WoW references, but unfamiliar readers will not understand large parts of the book.
Half of the work in this book is just cut and pasted from code scattered on the internet. If you don't know C++, how to exploit the Windows OS, or modifying memory, these walls of code don't make much sense.
This is the first book I have ever returned. The constant self promoting and lazy cut and paste code just frustrated the hell out of me.
MMO Macro and Botting guide 
I thought the book would contain more about FPS cheating and less about WoW. It's 90% about WoW. I don't work on an MMO so I got bored fast.
Not a horrible book, but not great either. I preferred Hoglund's Rootkit book since it had more generic approaches to subverting win32 processes.
If you work on an MMO, you should probably pick this one up.
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