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.
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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
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52 HN comments
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
Ray Kurzweil, George Wilson, et al.
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51 HN comments
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
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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
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45 HN comments
Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
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4.5 on Amazon
43 HN comments
ProfDreameronJuly 13, 2018
squinn2onJune 30, 2011
http://users.tmok.com/~pazzi/cuckoo_egg.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)
Mark_BonDec 6, 2010
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
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
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85840
DanBConDec 21, 2011
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
swalbergonFeb 14, 2013
davidwonMar 22, 2008
leejoramoonJan 18, 2013
dphaseonJan 14, 2013
jgrahamconApr 1, 2008
techsupporteronJune 22, 2019
LacraiaonDec 6, 2012
qwertyuiop924onNov 24, 2015
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
Does anyone have other hacking related books with story telling like in this book?
zinckiwionDec 19, 2019
davidwonOct 27, 2011
veddoxonDec 14, 2017
"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
(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
— 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
p4bl0onJan 14, 2013
I think that those three are my most favorite books of all time.
p4bl0onJune 9, 2020
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
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
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
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
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_%28book%29
http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionag...
nikcubonMay 20, 2011
adolphonJan 20, 2021
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
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
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
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 think that those three are my most favorite books of all time.
wglbonSep 6, 2014
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 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
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
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
jlgaddisonMar 2, 2017
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
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
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
"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
hoggleonJune 27, 2014
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
mindcrimeonOct 12, 2019
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 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
"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
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
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
gdubsonNov 25, 2012
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
* 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
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
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg
draegtunonFeb 12, 2010
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
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
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
iandiochonAug 29, 2018
- '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.