A Little Knowledge
by Michael Macrone

'Provides an enlightened tour through thousands of years of great thoughts, illuminating over 80 key concepts ranging from Plato's cave to the global village' (it says here). Sort of like John Allen Paulos's 'Beyond Numeracy', but branching out into philosophy, physics and economics. Luddism, Parkinson's Law, Phenomenology, Chaos, Entropy, Zeno's Paradox, Occam's Razor, The Uncertainty Principle, Evolution, Godel, Fuzzy Logic...etc, etc, etc. A treasure-trove of intellectual trivia - but don't expect depth!

The Cuckoo's Egg
by Clifford Stoll

A classic, of course, and getting on a bit now. Published in 1989, this is a postgraduate astronomer's account of how he stalked a German hacker who was using the university as a jumping-off point for military espionage. A great book and not too technical, but a little too hip for its own good (I've been to California and most Californians think all that Venice Beach stuff is weird too). I saw Stoll on TV once, and at least he's a real hippy.

Still a more gripping book than Stoll's purported anti internet (but really anti computer junkie) followup Silicon Snake Oil.

Takedown
by Tsutomu Shimomura

Shimomura, assisted by NY Times journalist John Markoff, tries to out-Stoll Stoll in this 1996 re-run of The Cuckoo's Egg. This tale
recounts the demise of Kevin Mitnick, 'the world's most wanted computer criminal'. Mitnick was a cell-phone fanatic and arrogant with it, breaking into computer after computer, we are told, stealing and trashing as he went. Shimomura, evidently a computer security guru (I've never heard of him either), became personally involved when Mitnick and his buddies broke into his computer and started leaving rude messages on his answerphone.

This book suffers from a couple of problems. First, it's padded with endless 'California lifestyle' twaddle about Shimomura roller-skating around town with cell-phones and pagers and computers strapped to his body, and as if that wasn't enough, we're treated to blow-by-blow accounts of his personal relationships. On top of all this, Shimomura comes across as an arrogant prima donna, to the extent that by the end of the book it would have been almost as entertaining if Mitnick had won. There's some interesting technical stuff in there, particularly about cell-phone technology, but in the end it's really just a long, drawn-out shadow of Clifford Stoll's book.

The Fugitive Game
by Jonathan Littman

'Online with Kevin Mitnick: The inside story of the great cyberchase'. Yes, it's the Mitnick v. Shimomura bout from the other corner, with journalist Jonathan Littman as Mitnick's second. Based on extensive telephone interviews with Mitnick while he was on the run, this is an interesting counterpoint to Shimomura's egotistical tome. It also downplays Shimomura's role in the affair while raising some searching questions about his affiliations with covert agencies. All in all, Littman's account paints a more sympathetic picture of Mitnick, and probably gives a better insight into his motivations.

The Hacker Crackdown
by Bruce Sterling

Sterling is most famous for his sci-fi novels (Schismatrix and The Artifical Kid are best), but he's also a supremely accomplished techno-journalist, as this work testifies. It's an account of 'Operation Sundevil', the US government's heavy-handed crackdown on computer hackers and other innocent bystanders (Steve Jackson Games, for example), and Sterling does a masterful job with the narrative. His publishing deal on the book is also somewhat unusual, as he demanded the right to make the text available for download at no charge. You can buy the book in paperback, or you can download it and read it on the screen.

Masters of Deception
by Joshua Quittner & Michelle Slatalla

More akin to War Games than Cuckoo's Egg, this book follows the exploits of teenage hackers from the Bronx. The book follows the evolution of the 'Masters Of Deception', a splinter group of the infamous 'Legion Of Doom', and features the rise and fall of teenage hackers with names like 'Erik Bloodaxe' and 'Phiber Optik'. It's the kind of book that would make a great movie if only a computer-literate producer could be found. It's all familiar stuff: kids breaking into telephone exchanges (sometimes literally) and 'dumpster-diving' to steal passwords, but it's told with genuine suspense and the real story is how inter-group feuds escalated between groups of hackers. It's not all fantasy either, and the book ends with a couple of the protagonists serving jail time.

The Armchair Universe
The Magic Machine
by A. K. Dewdney

Both these books (and, I think, a third, The Tinkertoy Computer) are
based on Dewdney's 'Computer Recreations' column in Scientific American and are great fun to read. The chapters are reworked from the original columns, with addenda in which Dewdney expands the original ideas with feedback received from readers. The subjects he covers are as bizarre as they are diverse: fractals, chaos, Core War, analogue computers, cellular automata and simulation, to name a few. The common thread is experimentation, and most chapters feature detailed algorithms spelled out so you can code along on your own computer. If it sounds dry, it isn't, because Dewdney has a knack of making the most mundane subjects interesting.

Dewdey is also the author of 'The Turing Omnibus', a somewhat drier
collection of essays on Computer Science, and '50% of What?' (not quite sure about that title), a sideways look at statistics, in the tradition of Darrell Huff and John Allen Paulos.