This is a very short book, with approximately 120 pages of actual text, a preface, a lengthy bibliography, and an index. It is listed at $99, which makes the price per page rather high. It is intended as a textbook, and is the result of a course given by the author at the University of Calgary. Readers will not learn how to build spyware by reading this book, nor will they learn how to build anti-spyware.

The chapters that follow the short introduction can be roughly grouped into three parts. The first part includes chapters 2 to 5, and deals with spyware, explaining how it installs itself on the user’s computer, how it manages to stay installed, how it logs the user’s keyboard activity, and how it forwards the gathered information to its home computer. The second part, which includes chapters 6 and 7, provides a taxonomy of advertisement techniques, and explains their implementation. The last part, which includes chapter 8, explains how user activity is tracked through browser cookies and user profiling in various, actual, or virtual places. A conclusion wraps up the book.

The programming examples are very simple and few. Readers must consult the notes after reading each chapter, and then go back through the chapter to locate the places that they reference.

Overall, this title does not seem to justify its high price.