Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to My Book Bulletproof TLS and PKI (Second Edition) Is Out
Hello HN. I am excited to share with you my new book, Bulletproof TLS and PKI. I've worked in this space since the very early days (think SSLv2), always frustrated with the fact that the field is vast but the documentation poor. That first led me to create SSL Labs (which ended up being very popular) and then the first edition of my book (in 2014), where I aimed to cover everything a curious person needed to know about SSL/TLS and PKI. Most importantly, it's a very practical book that you can use to just learn what you need at that moment. The second edition (just out) adds coverage of…
Bulletproof TLS and PKI (Second Edition) is a comprehensive guide to transport layer security and public key infrastructure. Written for developers, system administrators, and security professionals who need practical… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. My Book Bulletproof TLS and PKI (Second Edition) Is Out launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1IW
The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…
Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca · its alternatives →
- 2RW
hey folks! My book Real-World Cryptography was just released and is now shipping. I've been working on this thing for the last two years and a half, and the goal was to give a good overview of everything that can be classified as "real-world" about crypto. You'll find all the basics in the first half of the book, and the second half contains chapters on TLS, noise, PAKEs, post-quantum cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, MPC, cryptocurrencies, FHE, etc. So it's a good pick if you're learning, but also if you've been in the field for a while and want an intro to some subfield you're…
2021 · its alternatives →
- 3TC
Looking to get some feedback from the Hacker News community. I wrote the book with a focus on penetration testers and red teamers, but there are great examples for network admins, developers, and blue team defenders as well. You can pick up a copy for free here through May 19, 2019: https://gumroad.com/l/the_cyber_plumbers_handbook/hackernews... Please note, because it's hosted on Gumroad, it does require an email. If you don't want to give out your actual email, check out an anonymous email service. I give it away to students for free, so if you know of one that…
2019 · its alternatives →
- 4
Hey HN, I'm so excited to finally share with you what I've been working on recently. One month ago I asked my audience what they wanted to learn about Websites, APIs and Servers security [0]. From the feedback, I've identified a few recurring pain points that I've started to address (and many more) in this new book. From theory to practice, you will learn how low-level network and security protocols work. How to configure Cloudflare to secure and scale your web applications. How to create serverless applications and which database to chose with serverless functions. How to optimize your…
2023 · kerkour.com · its alternatives →
- 5
This book was a project that I started after two years of constant paranoia and anxiety, trying to achieve a decent level of privacy and anonymity. From the things I learned during that time, I decided to write a book to help jump-start the privacy and anonymity journey of those who might be in the same situation. I know this book is not a complete guide on how to harden your devices and operating systems, and it wasn't meant to be. It was supposed to cover the very fundamentals of privacy, security, and anonymity rather than the highly technical stuff that might exhaust and frustrate…
2024 · zolagonano.github.io · its alternatives →
- 6
Hey HN, I just wanted to share that after five months of intense work and countless caffeine-fueled writing sessions, "Master Software Architecture: A Pragmatic Guide" is now available. Writing this book was a crazy time. I entirely focused on it, and it took exactly 753 hours of writing, editing, and image editing & resizing(!) until the premiere. Yes, the last one (images) was a killer. If you ever think about writing a book, reserve a lot of time for it unless someone else does it for you. As a result, I am handing you the nearly 400-page book. It is a guide that will help you connect all…
2024 · leanpub.com · its alternatives →
- 7RW
Hi, creator here. This is a demo of our recent work presented at Oakland (IEEE S&P): https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/368. The server and client code are written in Rust and available here: https://github.com/menonsamir/spiral-rs. The general aim of our work is to show that homomorphic encryption is practical today for real-world applications. The server we use to serve this costs $35/month! A quick overview: the client uses homomorphic encryption to encrypt the article number that they would like to retrieve. The server processes the query and…
2022 · spiralwiki.com · its alternatives →
- 8MB
2020 · packtpub.com · its alternatives →
- 9
Hi HN! I'm currently a Master's student at USTC (University of Science and Technology of China). I've been diving deep into Data Engineering, especially in the context of Large Language Models (LLMs). The Problem: I found that learning resources for modern data engineering are often fragmented and scattered across hundreds of medium articles or disjointed tutorials. It's hard to piece everything together into a coherent system. The Solution: I decided to open-source my learning notes and build them into a structured book. My goal is to help developers fast-track their learning curve. Key…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10MI
An interactive book introducing programming with ClojureScript
2017 · langintro.com · its alternatives →
- 11IW
Hi HN! During the last few years, I worked on a few applications built with Go, running on AWS Lambda. As I got to know the platform better, I started to find Go & Lambda to be a really productive combination. The applications were fast, and they ended up being much cheaper to run than what my team & I had built before. It’s probably not the best platform for _every_ application, but I was surprised at how much of our workload worked well on it. As we brought new engineers on to our team and helped them get up to speed with the stack, I found that we were covering a lot of the same topics…
2021 · its alternatives →
- 12
Great book with a low barrier to entry for learning Haskell
2016 · haskellbook.com · its alternatives →
- 13TC
Hello! This project is a TLS/X.509 certificate manager and PKI. Designed to provision and install your TLS certificates across public and private endpoints. It's something I created for my home lab, but has quickly expanded as I have been experimenting more and more with AI development tooling. You can see the product overview: https://www.zaita.com It's architecture and usage is nicely documented: https://docs.zaita.com Unfortunately, you do need to sign up to have a play, but there is a demo instance that doesn't require a credit card. Just enter an email (I won't…
May 2026 · its alternatives →
- 14
Simple, auditable & elegant VPN, built with TLS mutual authentication and TUN. - twitchyliquid64/subnet
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15MT
2011 · pragprog.com · its alternatives →
- 16IM
2013 · lispwebtales.ppenev.com · its alternatives →
- 17
- 18
Hi everyone! I just released the Practical Python Projects book! (https://practicalpython.yasoob.me) I am happy to announce the first version as a release candidate. I have poured a lot of love into writing this book and would love to hear what you guys think. (A limited 100% off and discount coupons at the end) This is not a pure beginner book. The book does assume some background Python knowledge. You need to know the basics like methods, functions, classes, and such. If I use something that is not typically covered in beginner Python books, I will explain it before I use it.…
2021 · practicalpython.yasoob.me · its alternatives →
- 19
Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Tech
2016 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
- 20
Introduction to Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency technologies
2016 · d28rh4a8wq0iu5.cloudfront.net · its alternatives →
- 21
authzed▲83A colleague and I made a kids' picture book that introduces authorization concepts. We work at AuthZed and explain these concepts regularly. We thought it'd be fun to put them together in a format accessible and appealing to kids and grownups alike. It would also be helpful when explaining what we do for work and make a unique gift for our families. The goal was a fun story first and foremost. We aimed to present concepts accessibly but made conscious decisions to simplify, knowing we couldn't be comprehensive in a picture book format. We also wanted visually appealing illustrations, so we…
2021 · authzed.com · its alternatives →
- 22
I started writing this book 10 years ago in JavaScript, got through a few chapters (asymptotic notation, basic techniques, start of sorting), and then abandoned it. Recently I picked it back up, converted everything to TypeScript, and used AI (Zenflow [1] + Claude Opus 4.6) to complete the remaining chapters. I provided the structure, direction, and initial chapters; the AI generated the bulk of the remaining content under a spec-driven workflow. The book covers roughly a first 1-2 year CS curriculum: sorting, dynamic programming, graph algorithms, trees, heaps, hash tables, and more. All…
Mar 2026 · amoilanen.github.io · its alternatives →
- 23MN
Hello HNers. I'm launching my new service, Certician, and I'd love some feedback from HN users. A while back, I asked if anyone knew of any good, simple tools or services for monitoring SSL certificates [1]. I didn't find any compelling services, so I decided to build one. I tried to keep it simple, since it's self-run and bootstrapped. I know my landing page needs help. It's a lot harder to distill down a service (even a simple one) into compelling, actionable copy than I thought! I have to work at my real job today, so I'll only be able to reply when I have time to take a break for a…
2011 · its alternatives →
- 24
You don’t have to be a ninja to read this book.
2016 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →