qpmarl blog

The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll is a well written and entertaining book about the true story of a network administrator who tracks a hacker after discovering an unauthorized login to his system. I had given a copy (or two) of this book to Thomas, and picked it up when I was out there so that I can give it to someone else who might like it. So I started reading it again while I was there. It's really a very good story - especially if you're a big computer geek like me.

I stopped reading a third of the way through though because I went to Borders and found The Art of Intrusion by Kevin Mitnick. This is a collection of true hacker exploits and also very entertaining. This book goes into more technical detail than The Cuckoo's Egg and raises awareness of computer security holes with strategies to defend against hackers. I finished it while I was at "The Lake" in Canada. So I started another book that I picked up at Borders when I got The Art of Intrusion.

Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment by W. Richard Stevens and Stephen A. Rago is a very large computer programming text book. It is 927 pages long - I'm currently on page 219. Unfortunately, I do not have my computer with me to try out the sample programs and exercises, but I am absorbing a lot of information from this book and It'll be a big step towards really getting back into programming. I actually enjoy reading this sort of book.