This book is an interactive version of Ryan Tolboom's Computer Systems Security: Planning for Success. We are very grateful to Ryan Tolboom for his work in writing this work and for releasing it under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) since his work forms the core of this interactive book.
We are extremely grateful to Berea College's internship program and the superb Berea College students who converted this book to PreTeXt in Summer 2025.
- The generic version of this book is located at https://runestone.academy/ns/books/published/comp-sys-sec/index.html?mode=browsing.
- Instructors who wish to use this book go to https://runestone.academy/ and make an account using "comp-sys-sec" as the base book.
- Those wishing to report bugs or suggest improvements can do so at https://github.com/pearcej/comp-sys-sec/issues.
This book is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.
This book is built with the PreTeXt authoring system. The source code for this book is available at https://github.com/pearcej/comp-sys-sec. Contributions are welcome! If you find a bug, or have a suggestion for improvement, please open an issue on the GitHub repository. If you would like to contribute, please fork the repository and submit a pull request. If you are not familiar with GitHub, please see the GitHub documentation for help.
To compile the book as an accessible website, run pretext build web in a terminal from any directory of this project.
To preview your output, run pretext view web.
To deploy your output to GitHub pages, run pretext deploy.
To compile a pdf, run pretext build print.
Below you will find some advice for working with PreTeXt, including help with using the PreTeXt Codespace online editor through GitHub if you don't want to install the required software on your own computer.
See the PreTeXt documentation for links to a variety of resources.
We also recommend browsing through the annotated sample article and annotated sample book if you want to find examples and see the PreTeXt source for those examples quickly.
GitHub Codespaces are a way to set up your whole authoring system entirely in your browser. In case you are not already reading this inside a codespace, you can create one specifically designed for authoring in PreTeXt by using this template.
The most important thing to remember when authoring in a codespace is that you are making all your edits on a virtual machine off in some remote server farm. This means there is an extra step to save your files. You can save files in the editor (in your browser), but this just saves them to that virtual machine. To make sure you can access these files, even if the virtual machine goes away, you need to sync them to github.com. This is done by committing your changes and then pushing those commits (or "syncing" them). You might see a warning when you restart your codespace that you have "uncommitted changes" -- make sure you commit them when you are done working.
We have tried to keep the codespace small (so it starts up quickly and doesn't eat through your monthly storage allotment), so we do not include a full TeXLive distribution. We have tried to include most packages and fonts you are likely to need to generate images using <latex-image> elements, and to generate PDF print output. However, if you run into a situation where the LaTeX gives errors about packages missing (like it cannot find a mypackage.sty file), here is what you should do.
-
To quickly resolve the issue yourself, open a terminal (
Ctrl+Shift+`) and use the TeXLive Package Manager to install the missing package.
a. If you know that the package is calledmypackagethen enter the following two lines:tlmgr install mypackage tlmgr path add
b. If you don't know the name of the package, but know it should contain
mypackage.sty, then you can search usingtlmgr search --global --all "mypackage.sty" -
To ensure that you don't have to repeat this step every time you recreate the codespace, add the package name to the list of installs inside the file
.devcontainer/installLatex.shwhich gets run every time a codespace is created. -
Better yet, post the name of the missing package to this GitHub issue and we will add it to the devcontainer. This has the advantage that you will still get updates that other authors submit (if you edit the
installLatex.shfile, then it won't be updated when you runpretext update).
By far the largest space-hog in a PreTeXt authoring environment is SageMath, which is only required if you generate images using sageplots. By default, SageMath is not installed in a PreTeXt codespace, but it should be easy to install if you need it.
Just open the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P of F1) and search for "PreTeXt: Install SageMath". This will also update the .devcontainer/devcontainer.json file so that the next time you create a codespace for this project, it should install automatically.