I am humbled again as my book,.Hiding Behind the Keyboard, has been nominated for the Forensic 4:cast Digital Forensic Book of the Year.  It would be my honor if you would vote for the book. 

The two competing books are also great books, but this one is mine ?

I wrote this book primarily as a follow up to my first book, Placing the Suspect Behind the Keyboard, by adding more topics and material.  John Bair of Tacoma Police Department, helped immensely with the mobile forensic material for which he is an amazing expert.

For both Placing the Suspect Behind the Keyboard and Hiding Behind the Keyboard, the intention is to put the reader into the mindset of a detective in order to close a case.  “Closing a case” means to thoroughly

• investigate (both in the physical world and the digital world)
• find and evaluate evidence
• put together inferences
• draw reasonable suspicions and conclusions
• eliminate potential suspects
• identify the real criminals, and
• build such a great case that the defense chokes on the evidence

In short, the books are intended to show how an investigator can make a case and close it.  In both books, I have practically littered the pages with tips and tricks of the trade gained from personal experience and the experiences of the fantastic investigators I have been paired up with, from small state task forces to many federal task forces. Most of what I learned, I learned the hard way, fought through it, and kept improving on each investigation.  These books give the good stuff up front, the time saving tips spread throughout, and no nonsense in how to physically do the job.  If you work cases, I wrote the book for you.

If you investigate crimes (including civil matters, like corporate issues), you will find more than enough nuggets of gold to make your cases easier and more solid.  That was the intent of what I wrote, for you to close cases and put the criminal behind bars.

By the way, if you don't do real investigations, but write about them in fiction work...you'll find some pretty neat information on the way cyber (forensic) investigations work on the street.

Be sure to vote before May 31, 2017.  I would be grateful for your time to cast your vote and again, humbled even at the nominiation.  Note...you don't have to have bought the book to vote for it.   If you agree with the purpose of the book, your vote is most welcome.  You even can leave the entire voting selections empty except for the one best book category and just vote for my book. That would make me happy :) 

    If you have been in the digital forensics world for more than a day, then you know about peer reviews of analysis reports.  If you have ‘only’ been doing IR work where forensics isn't the main point (as in taking evidence collection all the way to court), then you may not be reading reports of opposing experts.  Anyway, the opposing expert peer review is one of the scariest reviews of all since the reader, which is again, the opposing expert, tries to find holes in your work.  The peer review is so effective to push toward doing a good job that I think it prevents errors by the examiner more than it does help opposing experts find errors of the examiner.  Peer reviews take different shapes depending on where it is being done (review of a book draft, review of a report, etc...) but in general, a peer review is checking the accuracy of the written words.

    Academia has always been under the constant worry of peer reviews.  One professor's journal may be peer reviewed by dozens of other professors in the same field, with the end result being seen by the public, whether good or bad. Peer reviews are scary, not for the sake that you made a mistake, but that maybe you could have missed something important that someone else points out to you.

    If you read a tech book and write a review of it (formally in an essay/journal, or informally on social media), consider yourself a peer reviewer of tech writings.  That which you say, based on what you read, is a peer review of that material.  Think about that for a second.  If you are in the field of the book you are reviewing, you practically are tech reviewing that book for accuracy (so make sure you are correct!).  That is a good thing for you as it boosts your experience in the field.  Always be the expert on the stand who can say, “I’ve read x number of forensic books and have given x number peer reviews on social media, Amazon, essays, etc….”.  If for nothing else, this shows more than that you just read books.  You read for accuracy and give public review of your findings. Nice.

    There is some stress in writing a peer review because you have to be correct in your claims.  Sure, maybe some things in the book could have been done a different way, but was it the wrong way?  The manner in which you come across in a peer review is important too.  Crass and rude really doesn't make you look great on the stand if you slam a book or paper.  You can get the point across just as well by being professional.

    Writing books takes no back seat to peer review stress, especially when it comes to technical books.  Not only does the grammar get combed by reviewers, but the actual technical details get sliced and diced.  Was the information correct? Was it current and up-to-date?  Is there any other information that negates what was written in the book?

    So, to get any positive reviews makes for a good day.  Not for the sake of ego, but for the sake of having done it right so others can benefit from the information.  Writing is certainly not about making money as  much as it is putting yourself out there to share what you have learned at the risk of having your work examined under a microscope by an unhappy camper.

    Which brings me to my latest reviews for Hiding Behind the Keyboard.  This is my third tech book (more to come in both nonfiction and fiction) and with each book, I have always cautiously looked at Amazon book reviews each time.  Not that I have written anything inaccurate, inappropriate, or misleading, but that I just want to have written something useful in a topic that I wish existed when I started out in the digital forensics field.  My best analogy of what it is like to write a book is to walk outside to your mailbox nude and then check Facebook to see what people say about you…then do it again.  At least I don't have a Facebook account...

    So far, the reviews for my latest book show that I did a good job (my gratitude to the reviewers).

And that brings me to another point of this post. 

    One of the social media reviewers is actually in a case study in the book.  Higinio Ochoa read and reviewed my book in a Tweet (as seen below).   

Finally finished reading @Brett_Shavers "Hiding behind the keyboard" and let me tell ya, the man killed IT! https://t.co/2qlQIDTYRn

— Higinio Ochoa (@0x680x690x67) April 29, 2016

    You will have to check the Internet to get Hig’s story, or read it my book…  Suffice to say he was a hacker who was caught, and then ended up as one of the case studies in my book.  Positive reviews from forensic experts are great, but so are reviews from former hackers that can double-validate the work.  Like I said, it takes a lot of guts to write a book and almost as much guts to peer review it in public.  That’s what we are doing when we write a review of a tech book.  We are all peer reviewers.

I had a discussion with a peer of mine about writing a book, in that my peer has been thinking of writing a book but never gets around to doing it.  After about two years of listening to how he should write his book, my response was “Dude, stop talking about it and write the darn book.”

His book idea is a nonfiction technical book and is about **secret topic** (of course I’m not leaking the topic or title!).  He is an expert, or at least knows a heckuv a lot more about the topic than I do.  I would buy the book tomorrow.  I even said that if he had written this book when he first told me about it, we’d be talking about the next edition and I would have already bought the first edition.  "Dude, you’re two years and two editions behind now!”

Which brings me to my point. Years ago, I said the same thing.  “Hey, I think I could write a book.” I said it a few people and one of the guys told me, “Dude, just write the darn book.” And so I did.  Three times already. Started a fourth. Plans for a fifth.  All from one person telling me to stop talking about it and write the book.  I took the suggestion to heart because he had already published several books himself. Thanks HC.

Fair warning: It’s not easy.

If you can get a contract, you’ll have deadlines to meet, standards to keep up, and demands placed on you by the publisher. Worse yet, if you don’t have a contract and want to self-publish, you have to place those same demands on yourself.

So now you know the secret. Just write the darn thing.