HackerNews Readings
40,000 HackerNews book recommendations identified using NLP and deep learning

Scroll down for comments...

An Introduction to Statistical Learning: with Applications in R (Springer Texts in Statistics)

Gareth James , Daniela Witten , et al.

4.8 on Amazon

72 HN comments

Mastering Regular Expressions

Jeffrey E. F. Friedl

4.6 on Amazon

72 HN comments

Game Programming Patterns

Robert Nystrom

4.8 on Amazon

68 HN comments

Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson, Dylan Baker, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

67 HN comments

Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series)

Kevin P. Murphy

4.3 on Amazon

66 HN comments

The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

Cliff Stoll, Will Damron, et al.

4.7 on Amazon

61 HN comments

Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ (2nd Edition)

Bjarne Stroustrup

4.5 on Amazon

58 HN comments

Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker

Kevin Mitnick, William L. Simon, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

55 HN comments

Modern Operating Systems

Andrew Tanenbaum and Herbert Bos

4.3 on Amazon

54 HN comments

Head First Design Patterns: Building Extensible and Maintainable Object-Oriented Software 2nd Edition

Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Robson

4.7 on Amazon

52 HN comments

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

Ray Kurzweil, George Wilson, et al.

4.4 on Amazon

51 HN comments

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Brad Stone, Pete Larkin, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

51 HN comments

Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools

Alfred Aho, Monica Lam, et al.

4.1 on Amazon

50 HN comments

Test Driven Development: By Example

Kent Beck

4.4 on Amazon

45 HN comments

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

Martin Fowler

4.5 on Amazon

43 HN comments

Prev Page 2/16 Next
Sorted by relevance

ProfDreameronJuly 13, 2018

"The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage" by Clifford Stoll is my all time favorite for vacation reading.

squinn2onJune 30, 2011

Cliff Stoll has a nice account of meeting Robert Morris at the NSA in chapter 45 of "The Cuckoo's Egg".

http://users.tmok.com/~pazzi/cuckoo_egg.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)

Mark_BonDec 6, 2010

"The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage" by Clifford Stoll was a great read.

The title gives away the premise of the book, but to think - it was all put into motion because of a $0.75 accounting discrepancy.

DanBC2onJan 18, 2013

This is briefly mentioned in Clifford Stoll's book "The Cuckoo's Egg" (which is great read).

It's a fascinating story. I also like his father's (or maybe it was his?) idea for a spellchecker - using statistical analysis.

thinkcomponJuly 29, 2008

I'd recommend "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Cliff Stoll. And of course, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman." And...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85840

DanBConDec 21, 2011

Computer related:

The Cuckoo's Egg, Clifford Stoll. A really nice description of his process to understand the system, and why something was wrong, and the progress to catching hackers.

wmfonMay 21, 2009

The Cuckoo's Egg: a true crime hacker espionage thriller.

swalbergonFeb 14, 2013

It reminds me of a high tech version of "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Clifford Stoll. In his case, he shorted out wires to cause transmission errors and made up fake data for the cracker to download.

davidwonMar 22, 2008

His book "The Cuckoo's Egg", is, on the other hand, a good read. And given some of the cyber-utopia-singularity type of people he probably ran across in those days, he was probably right to throw some cold water on things.

leejoramoonJan 18, 2013

"The Cuckoo's Egg" is one of the defining books of history of the Internet. Anybody in this field really should read it, and it is an exciting story.

dphaseonJan 14, 2013

The Cuckoo's Egg is an amazing read. You get a very play-by-play account of the story, see an 80s honeypot in action, and if I remember correctly, read about interactions with the still running Chaos Computer Club.

jgrahamconApr 1, 2008

Great memorabilia. I have a collection of autographed books (mostly from authors who spoke at Kepler's) including: TAOCP, Generation X, The Cuckoo's Egg, American Psycho, Hackers and Painters...

techsupporteronJune 22, 2019

It's funny, I've read "The Cuckoo's Egg," Clifford Stoll's book, probably twenty times now. I had no idea there was a documentary about it (The KGB, The Computer, and Me - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0308449/) until just now so thanks.

LacraiaonDec 6, 2012

I really enjoyed reading "The cuckoo's egg" by Clifford Stoll. The book covers real events that happened when computers weren't really personal.

qwertyuiop924onNov 24, 2015

I don't know if it's and audiobook, but I really enjoyed The Cuckoo's Egg, by Cliff Stoll. If you're a unix person, you probably won't learn anything, 'cept some history, but It's still a great story.

If not, how about Super Mario, the story of Mario and Nintendo through the years?

You can also try Ghost in the Wires, Kevin Mitnick's autobiography.

Finally, the excellent Exploding the Phone tells the story of the rise and fall of phone phreaking, and has a lot of interesting information on the phone network of the time.
None of these are especially technical, but they are fantastic reads, and presumably fantastic listens.

sprremixonSep 16, 2019

The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

Does anyone have other hacking related books with story telling like in this book?

zinckiwionDec 19, 2019

I also bought a copy of the Cuckoo's Egg when I was 12ish and devoured it. Then figured out enough about BBSes and the weird link some of them had to be able to send email to write him some fan-mail, to which he graciously replied. Thanks Cliff. Together with my father, you two set me on my career path.

davidwonOct 27, 2011

I read and reread The Cuckoo's Egg back in the day. It's a classic, as far as I'm concerned.

veddoxonDec 14, 2017

To understand the hacker culture, you must understand its background and history. Here are some good books:

"The Jargon File", Eric S. Raymond (ed.) http://www.catb.org/jargon/

"The Cuckoo's Egg", Cliff Stoll

"Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution", Steven Levy

"Where Wizards Stay up Late", Katie Hafner

esondereggeronJan 17, 2015

I just finished reading The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll this morning (And I highly recommend it!). In the Epilogue, Stoll writes about the Morris worm and briefly mentions:

(Harvard student Paul Graham sent him mail asking for "Any news on the brilliant project")

When I read that, I wondered if that was THE Paul Graham.

p4bl0onAug 31, 2016

In case you haven't read them yet. I very highly recommend those two books:

The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, by Bruce Sterling.

The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking A Spy Through The Maze Of Computer Espionage, by Cliff Stoll.

Both are excellent reads, and if you like old Usenet and BBS stories, you'll be served.

EDIT: By the way, the first one is freely available here: http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html. I have it in paper myself, but surely it is possible to make a good ePub from these HTML pages.

p4bl0onApr 2, 2017

Is he really the same Cliff Stoll who wrote The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking A Spy Through The Maze Of Computer Espionage? It is one of my all time favorite books. I really recommend it if you haven't read it already. I didn't know Cliff Stoll also made other awesome stuff. He really seems to be an amazing person.

p4bl0onJan 14, 2013

This is one of my favorite books. If you enjoy it you should also read The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stole, and Do It! by Jerry Rubin (this last one only a little related to the hacker subculture since it happens just before it existed but there are strong links between the Yippie movement and the phreaker scene which is the predecessor of the hacker scene).

I think that those three are my most favorite books of all time.

p4bl0onJune 9, 2020

The Campus Trilogy (Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work), by David Lodge.

DO IT!: Scenarios of the Revolution, by Jerry Rubin.

The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking A Spy Through The Maze Of Computer Espionage, by Cliff Stoll.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.

Logicomix, by Apóstolos K. Doxiàdis and Christos Papadimitriou.

Other books that I strongly recommend can be found here (some of them are in French): https://pablo.rauzy.name/miscellaneous.html#books

Update: Pirates de tous les pays, by Marcus Rediker is a translation of Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age which you can thus read in English :). It really is an awesome read! After I finished it I immidiately ordered 5 more copies to give them to friends.

mindcrimeonApr 4, 2011

+1 for Cryptonomicon. It isn't the easiest book to get through, but it's very worthwhile.

Another couple of possibilities might be:

The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder

http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/03164...

The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage - Clifford Stoll

http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionag...

Hackers & Painters - Paul Graham (yes, that Paul Graham)

http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/dp...

emsignonMay 15, 2020

The single most important thing that made me understand the hacker mindset as a teenager was the Jargon File. And the publications and conference videos of the Chaos Computer Club also had a great influence on me, as well as Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg.

Read books by hackers, watch conference talks. And ofc get to know hackers, go to hack spaces. Keep an open mind and be curious. That's a good starting point to see how hacker culture really is. It's mostly about unorthodox curiosity and having fun with machines and systems. Think of children playing with toys, who grew up and never stopped playing with toys.

Don't waste your time on pop culture presentations of hackers, like movies or reading articles about "great" hacks or hackers, it's misleading and not going to transform your mind to think like a hacker in any way.

qwertyuiop924onDec 24, 2016

LoTR is not something I can recommend. When I read it, it was a miserable trek, and I read obsessively. It was a book written by somebody who cares more about the language then they do they story, and it shows.

That's not necessarily bad, but unless you share that point of view, I'd give it a miss.

Anyways, in the same vein as Ghost in the Wires, I recommend The Cuckoo's Egg and Exploding the phone, which are both fantastic.

colonelxconFeb 20, 2010

For those of you who didn't know, Stoll is the author of "The Cuckoo's Egg", his (true) story of tracking down a hacker that broke into Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's computers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_%28book%29
http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionag...

nikcubonMay 20, 2011

The author is Clifford Stoll, who wrote the classic 'The Cuckoo's Egg'

adolphonJan 20, 2021

Clifford Stoll's book The Cuckoo's Egg has an interesting and nuanced take on TIA advocate Adm. John Poindexter's ideas. Late in the book Stoll comes to agree at least partly with what he describes as Poindexter's idea that any particular piece of data the hackers acquired was not critical, but when enough information was gathered and organized the new insights available to an adversary were critical. On the other side, Stoll takes extraordinary steps to coordinate government response to the hackers, much of which was ensuring information flow.

Is any sufficiently information sensitive government different from the Stasi? I think the difference may be what is done with the information. Is the information used arbitrarily, unequally or as blackmail, or are laws and rules enforced without favor? Do people have incentives to report the transgressions of others? Does the system increase or decrease trust within a society?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter

brudgersonMay 14, 2018

What I found interesting about his MO when I read Takedown was the idea of social engineering and stringing together scripts. In particular Mitnick was interesting because it was a counter-narrative to the world Stoll portrays in The Cuckoo's Egg, a world where only technical knowledge seemed to matter in relation to technical issues. I suppose I found Mitnick M.O. interesting because it was so much simpler...like the scene in Raiders of the Lost Arch where Jones faces the swordsman [sans violence]. Not that he was my hero or anything. But I never found myself relating Shimomura in the way I did with Stoll. My recollection is that his book felt like a knockoff written with the expectation that I should feel outrage. I didn't.

Stoll was the most interesting character in his book. Mitnick was far and away the most interesting character in Shimomura's book. Stoll was interesting because he was curious. Shimomura was dull because he was just offended. The book did well because Mitnick was interesting, because cloning cell phones was interesting, because breaking into computer systems is interesting...even to people who aren't going to do it.

cpachonJuly 14, 2015

Well he attended UC Berkeley in the 1970s, so it’s safe to assume that he has had lots of exposure to hippie culture.

There are actually quite strong connections between computer nerds and the counterculture of the 60s/70s. If you’re curious I recommend the following books:

# What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry / John Markoff. A great book with many fascinating characters.

# From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism / Fred Turner. Also an interesting read, but much less accessible than Markoff’s book.

# The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage / Clifford Stoll. Very good book, reads like a detective novel in a Berkeley setting.

PS. More psychedelic shirt goodness this way: https://www.google.com/search?q=larry+wall&tbm=isch

edanmonJuly 6, 2010

In case anyone doesn't know him, Clifford Stoll wrote "The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage", a book about his real experiences tracking down a group of computer hackers.

By the way, there's a bonus at the end of the book: he mentions Paul Graham (in the context of Robert Morris' worm). Was a pleasant surprise when I read the book.

Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionag...

Wiki about the book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_%28book%29

p4bl0onJan 14, 2013

I second this. And if you enjoy The Hacker Crackdown you should also read The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stole, and Do It! by Jerry Rubin, which are also non-fiction. The latter one is only a little related to the hacker subculture since it happens just before it existed but there are strong links between the Yippie movement and the phreaker scene which is the predecessor of the hacker scene.

I think that those three are my most favorite books of all time.

wglbonSep 6, 2014

Really a better list is by tom his own self: http://www.amazon.com/lm/R2EN4JTQOCHNBA/ref=cm_lm_pthnk_view...

My recommendations would add:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Codebreakers-Comprehensive-Communi... by David Kahn. Many stories of the whole history of secret communications, with lessons in op-sec, not changing the codes frequently enough, they can't possibly break this.

The John LaCarre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_le_Carr%C3%A9 books. Do you remember the point where someone says to Smiley "There is no reason to think that they tapped the phone" to which Smiley replies "There is Every reason".

A must read, I tell my students in my Security Awareness training classes is The Cuckoo's Egg http://www.amazon.com/The-Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Espionage/dp/.... Examples like default service accounts on Dec Vax with username Field and password Service. Note when this is written and are our habits really any better with junk hung on the internet? Concepts pioneered in his book, as effective as they are, are not practiced. Note the alarms going off, ignored, at a large retailer last thanksgiving. Or another retailer recently, "Wait, what, we are being attacked? I didn't feel anything".

Most vulnerable is the thinking "Well, they can't get our X because <thing we did>". I have a matrix of attacker motives and what they are after. There motives and targetsyou haven't thought of.

iuguyonApr 16, 2011

The Cuckoo's Egg is a fantastic book and definitely worth a read for regardless of forensic interest. It's very well written and a great story.

The slide author is one of the most knowledgeable experts on incident response today, his blog[1] is definitely worth a read now and again.

If you want to see what large scale operations look like today, the Ghostnet report[2] makes for compelling reading.

[1] - http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/

[2] - http://www.scribd.com/doc/13731776/Tracking-GhostNet-Investi...

qwertyuiop924onAug 7, 2016

I don't have any friends who haven't read it who would appreciate it, but Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg is both a highly entertaining thriller, a fascinating look at how computer security was, and is, viewed, and a highly personal story about a man trying to figure it all out. It's very funny, entirely true, and taught me a lot.

Oddly, a lot of people hated the various more personal aspects of the book, as you see Cliff's friends, and his life as a whole. While that's valid, calling it a flaw in the book is, I think, inaccurate. The book as much a story a story about Cliff as the shadowy hacker on the other side of the wires, and that's a big part of its charm, IMHO.

Ghost in the Wires, and Exploding the Phone are also good, and true stories.

pnathanonApr 16, 2011

The Cuckoo's Egg was the first real computer book I read. I went home and tried Unix commands on my DOS 6.21 286.

I read it years later - this time understanding what was going a wee bit better. Still a good book.

It was and is a great book.

The presentation linked is also pretty interesting. To me it has a ring of Psychology of Programming, wherein the same issues are found endemic to the situation for decades and decades.

barceonDec 18, 2014

The last time a communist country did a hack like this was during the Cold War. The hackers were coke addicted West Berliners paid off by the KGB to infiltrate high value and key .mil servers. My guess is that this time it is no different. Read Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg and you'll see how very little for geopolitics of these attacks have changed.

jlgaddisonMar 2, 2017

I was just a pre/early teen when most of this was happening but I can remember reading about it and being amazed, after becoming interested after reading _The Cuckoo's Egg_.

Today, I'm a network engineer at an ISP. Go figure.

> MAE-WEST is still at 55 South Market in San Jose, for example.

Yep, and fiber runs from there to 611 Folsom and into Room 641A.

(Edit: It probably wasn't quite that early in the Internet's life but it was still very young.)

FamicomanonMay 15, 2018

I have read Masters of Doom and both The Cuckoo's Egg and Dealers of Lightning and these recommendations are spot on. I'd love to reread all of these soon, especially Dealers of Lightning.

Something similar but perhaps a bit drier may be Accidental Empires by Robert X. Cringely about the personal computer wars. And yes, that's the same Cringely from the Triumph of the Nerds documentaries.

I also do not recommend David Kushner's Prepare to Meet Thy Doom and The World's Most Dangerous Geek audiobooks which I believe are anthologies of loosely related articles he has written over the years. The prose was a little too purple for me.

hprotagonistonMay 15, 2020

Worldview indoctrination is a fun game, I suppose. A mix of fiction and biography is probably about right:

Fiction:

Douglas Copeland's "Microserfs"

Neal Stephenson, "Snow Crash" and perhaps especially "Cryptonomicon" (the early randy chapters and anything about Eiphphyte in particular)

Real Genius (the film).

Nonfiction:

Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. All the elder gods are here.

Cliff Stoll, The Cuckoo's Egg.

mpyneonJan 14, 2013

http://www.secretservice.gov/ectf.shtml

"Significant impact" is a clause wide enough to drive a truck through just by itself.

If anyone has ever read The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll it gives some insight as to why the government might want to have an organization with the remit to "bring together not only federal, state and local law enforcement, but also prosecutors, private industry and academia."

dbarlettonOct 16, 2014

Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage http://www.amazon.com/The-Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Espionage/dp/...

hoggleonJune 27, 2014

Thanks for that list - to add to it some lighter, at-the-beach reading as well:

1989, The Cuckoo's Egg (a lot of 80s Unix/Vax anecdotes as well as a great story and lots of good-old hippie culture :)

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18154.The_Cuckoo_s_Egg

1996, Accidental Empires (a little frivolous but an enjoyable read nonetheless, focuses on beginnings of MS and Apple)

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27652.Accidental_Empires

1992, Game Over (Nintendo and video game history mostly 80s)

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/339584.Game_Over_Press_St...

2014, Console Wars (Sega and the video game / computer industry of the 80s and early 90s - somewhat of an answer to "Game Over")

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18505802-console-wars

Less people in this book but it's about computer history, right? Fascinating read, I didn't "finish" it yet - still great to dive into the book now and then:

2010, The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7754526-the-apollo-guidan...

---

~OT: The last book really makes me want to see Notch's 0x10c come to live again as you would have been able to program your own fully emulated ship computer in that game, unfortunately it got canceled. I'm hoping some future No Man's Sky mod will be going in that direction!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0x10c#Gameplay

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Man%27s_Sky

lotsofcowsonMar 1, 2013

How the hell has no-one mentioned Clifford Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg" yet? http://www.amazon.com/dp/1416507787

mindcrimeonOct 12, 2019

The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder. A classic that inspired many people (myself included) to become interested in the computing field.

Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier - Katie Haffner & John Markoff - there is some dispute about the factual accuracy of some of the book, but it's wildly entertaining nonetheless.

The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage - Cliff Stoll

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Steven Levy

Charles Proteus Steinmetz: The Electrical Wizard of Schenectady - Robert W. Bly

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe - Lee Smolin

The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next - Lee Smolin

The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real - William Irwin

veddoxonSep 1, 2016

"The Cuckoo's Egg" is an amazing book. I read it some months back and very much regretted not having read it earlier... It does a fantastic job of bringing 80's computing to life while at the same time boasting a plot stronger and more exciting than many thrillers (though true!).

"The Hacker Crackdown" is worth reading for the historical aspect, but it only deals with crackers, so I personally did not find it particularly engaging. (BTW, an epub is available via Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/101)

A third book that should be mentioned here is "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy, which I'm currently reading. It deals with "real hackers", starting in the 50s at MIT - a deserved classic.

raphman_onApr 17, 2015

Reminds me of this:

"This hacker guessed a password for their Unix system. From there, he became super-user by planting an egg in the systems area, then sliding into my computer.

A couple days later the SOB called me. Said his name was Dave. From Australia.

"I broke in to show that your security isn't very good."

"But I don't want to secure my computer," I replied. "I trust other astronomers."

Dave had other reasons for breaking in, too. "You think that hackers are bad. This proves otherwise."

"Huh? You break into my computer to show that hackers are good?"

"Yeah," Dave replied. "We're helping you out by finding your security faults."

Clifford Stoll, The Cuckoo's Egg

delbelonJune 24, 2018

> But new forms of centralization emerge, whether they arise in the form of bloated, draconian corporate software foisted on workers within a company, or as public products such as Google and Facebook, which have been gobbling up the open web and replacing it with means of control and manipulation. [1]

This reminds me of a book that came out in 1996 called Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway by Clifford Stoll. In it, he predicted, the internet will all turn into crap. At the time it was the most contrarian view point ever, I can't help to think I need to find a copy now in light of what facebook and mobile phones and their negative effect on society has done.

He wrote an amazing book called the Cuckoo's Egg before that, basically everyone in silicon valley has probably read and can relate to if you are from that era.

duncanronDec 10, 2007

Strange that RTM's worm is ranked at number 1 with 10k - 100k of damages, whilst ILOVEYOU is number 2 with 5.5 - 8.7 billion. I wonder what their ranking criteria is.

Cliff Stoll tells a story in "The Cuckoo's Egg" about knocking on RTM's door whilst investigating this worm and having the door answered by RTM's room-mate. I've wondered for a couple of years if that was the first sighting of PG in the wild... ;-)

wyclifonDec 20, 2010

Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg comes immediately to mind.

gdubsonNov 25, 2012

Use short sentences. And break traditional rules. Like using "and" or "but" at the beginning of a sentence. Favor verbs. Avoid superfluous adjectives.

Paragraphs can be brief.

Bring people into your writing, wherever possible. That is, express your ideas through relatable stories involving people, wherever possible.

Many of these tips were yanked from Cliff Stoll, author of "The Cuckoo's Egg". As well as a book called, "The Art of PlainTalk", by Rudolph Flesch. Stoll was responding to criticism that his first book had been ghostwritten -- few could believe the guy could actually write.

Lastly, write frequently. A writing teacher of mine used to have us "free write" every morning for fifteen minutes. That's where you start writing about the first thing that pops in your head, and you don't stop writing until the time is up. Give it a try.

iuguyonDec 14, 2010

I would agree. Some of the books I'd highly recommend for anyone looking to be a well-rounded hacker:

* TCP/IP Illiustrated (Volumes 1,2 & 3) - W. Richard Stephens

* The Web Application Hacker's Handbook - Stuttard, Pinto et al

* The Shellcoder's Handbook - Kozoil, Aitel et al

* The Cuckoo's Egg - Clifford Stoll

* Neuromancer - William Gibson

* ARM System-on-chip Architecture - Stephen B. Furber

* Operating Systems Design & Implementation - Tanenbaum

* The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System - McKusick, Neville-Neil

These are just a few, and I'm sure there's plenty of others, even better ones. But to truly round yourself out you need to know more than programming a few languages - you need to know the low-level end of things and the high-level view of the world.

emacsenonJuly 22, 2018

A little context on the author is in order.

His name is Clifford Stoll and he was a physicist and early Internet user. He wrote the book "The Cuckoo's Egg" which should be required reading for all sys-admins.

In the mid-90s, he saw the Internet as something akin to Fahrenheit 451 and began preaching how it would tear us apart as a society. To that end, he wrote Silicon Snake Oil and articles like this one, which combines philosophy and cultural observations (the mob mentality of the crowd) with nonsensical conclusions based on the current technology (ie that online shopping would never be a big thing). I was never sure if he genuinely believed that it wasn't possible, or if he was merely trying to make the web less appealing somehow to prevent it from happening.

Years later he started to sell Klein Bottles on his website. I'm not sure if he still does, but in the year 2000, you could order them from him and he'd take your order over the phone. I ordered a few and it was fun to talk to him.

leejoramoonJuly 12, 2020

The Cuckoo's Egg tells the story of the early internet, breaking into Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s net by Cold War spiss. Well Written by Clifford Stoll the net admin/astronomer at the center of the story. Plenty of the tech and culture of the internet young internet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg

draegtunonFeb 12, 2010

There was a time when I use to keep a handwritten journal of daily work "stuff" I did on programming, sysadmin & management. I think I got the idea from Clifford Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg" and I found it to be very useful "logging" system of my past activities :)

Anyway as you can imagine it was hard to keep this up and eventually fell by the wayside. However I have found blogging to be a handy subset of this and the fact it can be useful to others inspires me to keep at it.

DanBConFeb 28, 2012

Clifford Stoll, in "The Cuckoo's Egg"[1] describes the hardest interview he ever had. The interviewer asked "Why is the sky blue?" and then, after Stoll gave his answer, asked "Why?" This process repeated several times, until Stoll was describing in great detail some advanced physics and chemistry and math.

In that spirit:

Please could you describe electron and hole flow in semiconductors? Why? Why? Why?

There's lots of bits of computing that works because it works even though we don't really know why it works.

mindcrimeonMay 29, 2017

Gosh, there's so many. But these come to mind:

1. Neuromancer - William Gibson

2. Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

3. Hackers - Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Steven Levy

4. How to Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard

5. Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter

6. The Pragmatic Programmer - Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas

7. The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder

8. Code - Charles Petzold

9. The Shockwave Rider - John Brunner

10. Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become
Book
- Peter Morville

11. Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug

12. The Design of Everyday Things - Donald A. Norman

13. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering - Fred Brooks

14. Decline and Fall of the American Programmer - Ed Yourdon

15. Cube Farm - Bill Blunden

16. The Philip K. Dick Reader

17. The Cuckoo's Egg - Clifford Stoll

18. The Prince - Niccolò Machiavelli

19. The 48 Laws of Power - Robert Greene

20. The Atrocity Archives - Charles Stross

21. Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System - Bill Gates

wglbonMar 27, 2010

While I was first reading "The Cuckoo's Egg" when it first came out, I found myself asking "instead of laws penalizing the teenagers that are penetrating these open systems, how about making it an equivalent felony for putting into a production a system that has the service account userid/password 'field/service'". I wonder if a couple of public wrist slaps or stronger, depending on the damage, might have changed that course of history.

iandiochonAug 29, 2018

Without any doubt, I'd recommend the following books:

- 'Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon' by Kim Zetter.

- 'The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage' by Clifford Stoll.

Both of these books are old-school infosec stories, and both are well worth the time. If I remember correctly, I listened to Countdown to Zero Day over a few days on Audible, and read The Cuckoo's Egg in one or two sittings in paperback.

Built withby tracyhenry

.

Follow me on