The Linux Ninja

UPDATE: Edited to reflect my mistake of saying Jayson Street donating all of his proceeds from his book to Hackers for Charity. He is, however, donating a portion of his proceeds to Hackers for Charity so you should still buy it for that and because it’s a great book

I just wanted to make a few quick book recommendations about one book I recently finished reading and one I plan to start reading as soon as it arrives.
I read Daemon by Daniel Suarez in about a week and I found it very engrossing. The basic idea is that a genius programmer named Matthew Sobol who is dying of brain cancer has created programs that are waiting for triggers (the first one being news of his death). Once these daemons trigger they start setting events in motion that enable a distributed and extremely sophisticated AI to coordinate an attempt at restructuring everything according to Sobol’s vision. The only things that took me out of the book were the technical definitions he inserted in the beginning of the book that felt kind of out of place. I felt they might be better placed in a glossary area or made a little simpler. When one of the characters gives a very technical definition of VOIP to a very non-technical cop and the cop accepts it like he understands it just didn’t feel right. That’s my only major gripe with the book and once he gets some initial terminology out of the way those parts disappear and the story gets moving pretty fast. I somewhat saw the ending coming but that was more because I heard some snippets about the sequel and I was able to piece together what needed to happen to get to some of the vague plot points I heard. I definitely recommend reading the book and then following up with the sequel Freedom (TM) when it comes out early next year.

My other book recommendation is Dissecting the Hack: The f0rb1dd3n Network by Jayson Street and others. Jayson has said that he will be donating all of his proceeds a portion of his proceeds to Hackers for Charity and the link I provide is via Johnny Long’s affiliate link so you can end up helping Johnny double . My copy is currently on order and I am waiting for it to arrive so I can dive in.