Why am I passionate about this?
I love nerds. I’ve always identified as one and years working in the high-tech world of Silicon Valley made me appreciate their passion, dedication to optimization, and wonderful senses of humor. I once scheduled a meeting with a programmer and afterwards he said “this meeting wasn’t the complete waste of time I expected,” and I took that as a compliment. A lot of books and movies make nerds pretty and shiny and one note. The nerds in these books all rang true to me—they approach difficult situations with logic and humor. They’re complex and compassionate and the kind of people I want to know more about.
Rebecca's book list on nerds getting into trouble
Why did Rebecca love this book?
A nonfiction book about an actual nerd who stubbornly investigated a 75 cent accounting error and ended up uncovering an international espionage ring during the Cold War. As nerds do. Along the way, he invented many techniques still used in cybersecurity. It ought to be dry, but it’s funny and charming and it perfectly evokes Berkeley in the 1980s. I was a computer operator at Carnegie Mellon and my workday was very similar to Stoll’s. For me this book was a time machine to my early 20s. I could see, hear, and feel every scene. If you ever think that your nerdy obsessions don’t matter—this shows that they do.
3 authors picked The Cuckoo's Egg as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Before the Internet became widely known as a global tool for terrorists, one perceptive U.S. citizen recognized its ominous potential. Armed with clear evidence of computer espionage, he began a highly personal quest to expose a hidden network of spies that threatened national security. But would the authorities back him up? Cliff Stoll's dramatic firsthand account is "a computer-age detective story, instantly fascinating [and] astonishingly gripping" (Smithsonian).
Cliff Stoll was an astronomer turned systems manager at Lawrence Berkeley Lab when a 75-cent accounting error alerted him to the presence of an unauthorized user on his system. The hacker's code name…