I just published the second edition of the X-Ways Forensics Practitioner’s Guide. If you use X-Ways Forensics in any sense of running the application, you should get this book.  I can’t say that any stronger than that.  But this post is not about the X-Ways book, at least not completely.

If you want to see the book or buy it, here it is:

In this second edition book, I asked and received contributions from forensic examiners who are X-Ways Forensics users. These contributions were tested and evaluated, and published as a complete section of forensic processes (and war stories) with X-Ways Forensics. This serves several levels of awesomeness.

For one, readers get more perspectives on how to use X-Ways Forensics than just me.  I know some things, but not all things.  Second, these contributors, if they were in a shell, jumped right out front and put their work on the scale to be weighed.  This is a major thing to do, because if you are wrong, you gotta take the hit and then move forward to improve.  But if you were right, that will have validated your previous work as being logically correct.  All contributions were awesome, and now, each contributor has a formally published forensic process using a tool that they know well.  Few things are greater than that in a case when you have published works.  For that, I am grateful, and the readers will benefit.  The contributors also have the right to use their contributions as they wish, whether that be as an attachment to a case report, affidavit, or in their CV.

This brings me to another work in progress (two new book projects that will be ramping up soon).  For one of my next books, I will be asking for contributors in the same manner, for a similar sort of content. My intention is to pull some great forensicators out of their cubicle and into the DFIR community's eye to display their work, their processes, their wins, and their perspectives to share with the community at large.

This takes a lot of guts, but there is such a huge personal, professional, and community benefit when you can help someone else do better and be better by simply sharing.

With that, this next book will be the most comprehensive writings in forensics that I will have ever done, and quite unique is scope and scale.  It will certainly take me a year+ to finish it, but it will be so well worth it.