Almost an entire year ago (just a few days apart) I announced my first published book, called SELinux System Administration. The book covered SELinux administration commands and focuses on Linux administrators that need to interact with SELinux-enabled systems.

An important part of SELinux was only covered very briefly in the book: policy development. So in the spring this year, Packt approached me and asked if I was interested in authoring a second book for them, called SELinux Cookbook. This book focuses on policy development and tuning of SELinux to fit the needs of the administrator or engineer, and as such is a logical follow-up to the previous book. Of course, given my affinity with the wonderful Gentoo Linux distribution, it is mentioned in the book (and even the reference platform) even though the book itself is checked against Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora as well, ensuring that every recipe in the book works on all distributions. Luckily (or perhaps not surprisingly) the approach is quite distribution-agnostic.

Today, I got word that the SELinux Cookbook is now officially published. The book uses a recipe-based approach to SELinux development and tuning, so it is quickly hands-on. It gives my view on SELinux policy development while keeping the methods and processes aligned with the upstream policy development project (the reference policy).

It's been a pleasure (but also somewhat a pain, as this is done in free time, which is scarce already) to author the book. Unlike the first book, where I struggled a bit to keep the page count to the requested amount, this book was not limited. Also, I think the various stages of the book development contributed well to the final result (something that I overlooked a bit in the first time, so I re-re-reviewed changes over and over again this time - after the first editorial reviews, then after the content reviews, then after the language reviews, then after the code reviews).

You'll see me blog a bit more about the book later (as the marketing phase is now starting) but for me, this is a major milestone which allowed me to write down more of my SELinux knowledge and experience. I hope it is as good a read for you as I hope it to be.