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Showing posts from April 17, 2011

Cryptonomicon

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Yep - thats the one. Took almost 2 months to finish this monster. Recommended reading for geeks, nerds and all the in betweens. I first read about Neal Stephenson in a Wired article in 2006. Since then have been on the look out for his books. Every year will go to Strands book facility and will ask them about any of his books - they will draw a blank. Anyway - found this book in JustBooks in February- the wonderful library chain that has been feeding me books for the last 2 years. This is one big masala book - has some mathematics ( yep - equations, graphs and all that ), computer stuff of late 90s when the book was written ( Finux is the OS one of the main character uses - I do not know why he did not use the word Linux ), has an elaborate VC/lawyer, entrepreneur battle, nerd culture of late 90s - and of course the whole underlying theme - cryptography. The book starts during World War II and the interesting stories are only here. Alan Turing and his college buddies fight it o