The Anti-Virus Book Home Page -- ABOUT THE AUTHOR

About the Author

About Myself

This is Saumil Udayan Shah at your service. To give you a very brief introduction, I come from the city of Ahmedabad, in India. I studied Computer Engineering from India, and am currently pursuing my Masters degree in Computer Science from Purdue University, USA.

I shall not continue to drone on here, instead, will refer you to my home page, where you can find out more(?) about me. Click on the link below to visit my homepage:

Saumil's home page

You may be curious to know what prompted me to write this book. The primary reason was that when I was trying to find solutions to combat viruses, I had visited many bookstores, looked at many publications, but could not find any resource which explained it all. Bits and pieces of information are scattered in various resources, but none which contains a comprehensive collection of such information. Plus, hacking viruses is, shall I say, an unconventional practise and the people who successfully hack viruses dont tend to give out their secrets. Viruses are something that are to be looked upon as a public menace, and I view upon removing viruses as more of a service than a source of income. If more and more computer users get equipped to combat viruses, we will have a safer and a more productive computing environment.

Another important reason was that I wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of simple techniques and public domain software when it comes to fighting viruses. During my work with viruses, I observed that given a few simple tools and commonsense, one can achieve a very high level of virus protection. And these days, public domain anti-virus software products are is as effective as their commercial counterparts. Viruses sneaking into your system are totally uncalled for - so why should we pay to get rid of them if we can do it almost for free? I wanted to emphasize these ideas through the Anti-Virus Book, which shows how it can be done.

The third and the last reason was that I had nothing better to do! Hence, I wrote this book!

A final request. If this book helps you in any way and saves you a lot of trouble, do let me know of your success stories and I shall be delighted to hear from you.

Thank you.