The Internet is an all pervasive entity in today’s world of computing. To cope with the "wild" Internet, several security mechanisms were developed, among them access controls, authentication schemes and firewalls, as one of the most secure methods.

However, firewall means different things for different people. Consider the fable from India about the blind men and the elephant. Each blind man touched a different part of the elephant and came up with a totally different description. The blind man who touched the elephant’s legs described it as being similar to a tree. Another blind man touched the tail and decided an elephant was like a twig. Yet another grabbed the trunk and concluded an elephant was like a snake. To some computer professionals, even to some of those in charge of Internet security, firewalls are just "walls of fire" blocking hackers outside of it. To some others, it is only a form of authentication mechanism. Some other folks consider firewalls to be synonymous with routers. Obviously, a firewall is much more than any of these individually.

The problem is only compounded by the fact that for a lot of computer and security professionals, firewalls was touched upon only fleetingly in their academic career, worse, they bumped into it at the computer room. Also, a lot of the important parts and features of firewall are recent innovations, and thus were never covered in an academic career or most of the 1995-1996 firewall books at all, which further aggravates the problem as of right now there is no one single book these professionals can turn to. Their only resource is to peruse a wide array of literature including textbooks, web pages, computer magazines, white papers, etc.

This book, the Complete Firewall Handbook, aims to become your companion book, the one you will always want to carry with you, as it does claim to be complete! I can assure you, there may be some similar books on the market, but none is complete as this one, none provides a reference guide as this one. The other titles I know are either discussing a specific technology and strategy or a product.