Wait - what's this book called?

You may find this book refered to as "Hacking Exposed Linux" here and there, including McGraw-Hill's own site. Why? Well, "Hacking Exposed" is a trademark of McGraw-hill, and "Linux" is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. The McGraw-Hill legal folks thought it might be a bad idea to stick one inside the other. So to avoid any trademark confusion, they created more confusion by changing the name of the book.

Brian and James think this is pretty damned silly. We didn't find out about the change until a few days before it went to print. Yeah, true, we went out and registered hackingexposedlinux.com just in case, but we have no intention of getting rid of the Hacking Linux Exposed name.

Here are some of our reasons we think the new name is silly. Feel free to email us with your suggestions and we'll add them to the list.

• "Hacking Exposed Linux" sounds like there are a bunch of naked Linux running around. Typically you see Linux developers with their clothes on, and we think that's for the best.

• HLE is a much better TLA than than HEL. HEL tends to become HELL far too easily.

• HEL looks like a typo. HLE looks intentional.

• What are we exposing? "Hacking Linux". It just makes gramatical sense.