Here are 100 books that The New Hacker's Dictionary fans have personally recommended if you like
The New Hacker's Dictionary.
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Jeremy N. Smith is the author of three acclaimed narrative non-fiction books, including Breaking and Entering, about a female hacker called “Alien” and the birth of our information insecurity age. He has written for The Atlantic, Discover, Slate, and the New York Times, among other outlets, and he and his work have been featured by CNN, NPR, NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, and Wired. He hosts The Hacker Next Door podcast and lives in Missoula, Montana.
The Journal of IHTFP (look up that acronym!) is a delightful introduction to the original hacking scene at MIT, where hacks were elaborate, extremely clever student pranks—handing out colored cards at a Harvard-Yale football game to spell MIT rather than BEAT YALE when raised by eleven hundred Harvard fans, for example, or sneaking a power supply, multi-piece wooden frame, and the outer metal parts of a Chevrolet Cavalier atop the school’s Great Dome, so it appeared that the building was mounted by a real police cruiser, complete with flashing lights and boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts. The oversized book includes numerous photographs. Now out of print, it has been replaced by Nightwork by T. F. Peterson, which includes more recent hacks.
Jeremy N. Smith is the author of three acclaimed narrative non-fiction books, including Breaking and Entering, about a female hacker called “Alien” and the birth of our information insecurity age. He has written for The Atlantic, Discover, Slate, and the New York Times, among other outlets, and he and his work have been featured by CNN, NPR, NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, and Wired. He hosts The Hacker Next Door podcast and lives in Missoula, Montana.
Hackers is a classic account of the computer revolution, centered on the pioneering tinkerers, gamers, social theorists, entrepreneurs, and other explorers who made military and corporate technology personal. These are not hackers in the criminal sense most people understand the term today, but men (and a few women) like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others far less famous. Their interwoven biographies are brilliantly researched and reported, underpinned by what Levy calls a common “hacker ethic” whose tenets dominate our economy, politics, and culture today.
Steven Levy's classic book about the original hackers of the computer revolution is now available in a special 25th anniversary edition, with updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zukerberg, Richard Stallman, and Tim O'Reilly. Hackers traces the exploits of innovators from the research labs in the late 1950s to the rise of the home computer in the mid-1980s. It's a fascinating story of brilliant and eccentric nerds such as Steve Wozniak, Ken Williams, and John Draper who took risks, bent the rules, and took the world in a radical new direction. "Hacker" is often a derogatory…
Jeremy N. Smith is the author of three acclaimed narrative non-fiction books, including Breaking and Entering, about a female hacker called “Alien” and the birth of our information insecurity age. He has written for The Atlantic, Discover, Slate, and the New York Times, among other outlets, and he and his work have been featured by CNN, NPR, NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, and Wired. He hosts The Hacker Next Door podcast and lives in Missoula, Montana.
We Are Anonymous, along with Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman, explores the politics and personalities of the best-known real-world hacktivist group, Anonymous, how it rose to prominence and power, its impact and influence, and the government machinations that ultimately turned members against each other. Its pages reveal hackers at their most human—brilliant, idealistic, vulnerable, and conflicted.
A thrilling, exclusive exposè of the hacker collectives Anonymous and LulzSec.
We Are Anonymous is the first full account of how a loosely assembled group of hackers scattered across the globe formed a new kind of insurgency, seized headlines, and tortured the feds -- and the ultimate betrayal that would eventually bring them down. Parmy Olson goes behind the headlines and into the world of Anonymous and LulzSec with unprecedented access, drawing upon hundreds of conversations with the hackers themselves, including exclusive interviews with all six core members of LulzSec.
In late 2010, thousands of hacktivists joined a mass digital…
Jeremy N. Smith is the author of three acclaimed narrative non-fiction books, including Breaking and Entering, about a female hacker called “Alien” and the birth of our information insecurity age. He has written for The Atlantic, Discover, Slate, and the New York Times, among other outlets, and he and his work have been featured by CNN, NPR, NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, and Wired. He hosts The Hacker Next Door podcast and lives in Missoula, Montana.
A famous hacker’s real-life story, told from his own perspective, Ghost in the Wires explains how criminal hackers think and act and the diverse techniques they use, no keyboard necessary—all, in this case, with little motive beyond a compulsion to explore and exploit. The hacking community has no bigger characters than Kevin Mitnick and no better first-person accounts of the art of “social engineering,” or human hacking—manipulating people (including, in Mitnick’s case, the FBI and other would-be pursuers) to your own advantage.
In this "intriguing, insightful and extremely educational" novel, the world's most famous hacker teaches you easy cloaking and counter-measures for citizens and consumers in the age of Big Brother and Big Data (Frank W. Abagnale).
Kevin Mitnick was the most elusive computer break-in artist in history. He accessed computers and networks at the world's biggest companies -- and no matter how fast the authorities were, Mitnick was faster, sprinting through phone switches, computer systems, and cellular networks. As the FBI's net finally began to tighten, Mitnick went on the run, engaging in an increasingly sophisticated game of hide-and-seek that escalated…
I started learning cryptography in the early 2000s with books borrowed from my university’s library, and with information I could find online. Since then I’ve practiced cryptography for 15 years in a variety of contexts: as an academic researcher, while working on my PhD; as a cryptography engineer for software and hardware pay-TV systems; as a consultant for private and public sector clients; as a vulnerability researcher in my spare time; as a code auditor for cryptography projects; as a start-up founder in the domain of IoT security; and as CSO (chief security officer) of a fintech start-up. I live in Lausanne, Switzerland, and besides crypto I enjoy literature, rock climbing, and playing classical guitar.
One of the books that I open at least once a year, and which I always recommend to students and mentees. Security Engineering isn’t a book (only) about cryptography, yet one about a topic that a cryptographer should know well: security engineering, or the design, implementation, and testing of systems that must be reliable in hostile and adversarial environments. Cryptography is indeed often just a small, yet critical, component of larger security systems. A good cryptographer must therefore not limit themselves to their field, but understand the risks, practical constraints, and functional needs of the environment where cryptography is integrated. Anderson’s book is the undisputed reference in that space.
Now that there's software in everything, how can you make anything secure? Understand how to engineer dependable systems with this newly updated classic
In Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems, Third Edition Cambridge University professor Ross Anderson updates his classic textbook and teaches readers how to design, implement, and test systems to withstand both error and attack.
This book became a best-seller in 2001 and helped establish the discipline of security engineering. By the second edition in 2008, underground dark markets had let the bad guys specialize and scale up; attacks were increasingly on users rather than…
Like most geeks, I've always loved efficiency and productivity. Coming from a Windows-dominated world, the command line I was faced with in my CompSci degree was Initially mystifying, but over time I have come to see it as the most powerful human-computer interface out there. After spending years wresting with the command line at work, I decided to write a book on bash, and have blogged extensively on this and related topics. I also run live courses on bash and the command line for O'Reilly. There's nothing I enjoy more than opening people's eyes to the power of the shell!
Regular expressions are the cornerstone of command line wizardry.
They are used in pretty much all command-line tools, and all programming languages.
If you read this book, you'll have a deep understanding of what's going on, and the knowledge to go from hand-waving and guessing your way through regular expression writing to the mastery the book promises.
Regular expressions are an extremely powerful tool for manipulating text and data. They are now standard features in a wide range of languages and popular tools, including Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, VB.NET and C# (and any language using the .NET Framework), PHP, and MySQL. If you don't use regular expressions yet, you will discover in this book a whole new world of mastery over your data. If you already use them, you'll appreciate this book's unprecedented detail and breadth of coverage. If you think you know all you need to know about regular expressions, this book is a stunning eye-opener.…
I’ve spent more than a decade working on infrastructure, from my early days at LinkedIn, where we had to do a massive DevOps transformation to save the company, to co-founding Gruntwork, where I had the opportunity to work with hundreds of companies on their software delivery practices. From all of this, I can say the following with certainty: the DevOps best practices that a handful of the top tech companies have figured out are not filtering down to the rest of the industry. This is making the entire software industry slower, less effective, and less secure—and I see it as my mission to fix that.
This book felt like a chance to sit with a few experienced Ops people and hear their war stories.
The book is full of concrete, actionable learnings that are essential for running software, including operational requirements (e.g., configuration, draining, hot swaps, feature toggles, graceful degradation, etc.), software architecture (e.g., three-tier web service, four-tier web service, load balancing models etc.), scaling patterns (e.g., horizontal duplication, service splits, caching, etc.), resiliency patterns (software vs hardware resiliency, spare capacity, failure domains, etc.), and much more.
I loved being able to pick up decades of experience and hard-won knowledge by just flipping through a few pages of a book!
"There's an incredible amount of depth and thinking in the practices described here, and it's impressive to see it all in one place."
-Win Treese, coauthor of Designing Systems for Internet Commerce
The Practice of Cloud System Administration, Volume 2, focuses on "distributed" or "cloud" computing and brings a DevOps/SRE sensibility to the practice of system administration. Unsatisfied with books that cover either design or operations in isolation, the authors created this authoritative reference centered on a comprehensive approach.
Case studies and examples from Google, Etsy, Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, and other industry giants are explained in practical ways that…
As a computer science professor and educator, my teaching motto is Rigor and Vigor. I believe that the only way to learn something deeply, whether it's an abstract mathematical argument or a complex computer system – is building the thing from the ground up, from first principles. That's the rigor. The second requirement – vigor – comes from the need to make this learning experience captivating, rewarding, empowering. I spent much of my career developing books, courses, and games that help learn computer science and mathematics with gusto. I am pleased that this work has had an impact, and that it resonates with many students and self-learners around the world.
This popular book takes a broad perspective that surveys the main physical and logical layers from which all digital devices are made.
I like the accessible writing style, aimed at lay readers, and the book’s companion website, where one can experiment interactively with many of the artifacts described in the book. The second edition includes a new section that focuses on a functional subset of Intel 8080, the microprocessor that ushered the personal computing revolution, and the instruction set used by many PCs and servers today.
What do flashlights, the British invasion, black cats, and seesaws have to do with computers? In CODE, they show us the ingenious ways we manipulate language and invent new means of communicating with each other. And through CODE, we see how this ingenuity and our very human compulsion to communicate have driven the technological innovations of the past two centuries.
Using everyday objects and familiar language systems such as Braille and Morse code, author Charles Petzold weaves an illuminating narrative for anyone who's ever wondered about the secret inner life of computers and other smart machines.
I’m a comic fan first, then a comic creator. I grew up on the classics—Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side and excitedly watched as new comics popped up online. I love comic strips and have rows of collections lining my bookshelves. The coolest part of starting my own series has been becoming a member of a cartoonist community that I have always been a huge fan of.
Joshua has a really unique sense of humor that’s accompanied by absolutely stunning art.
The comics are really worth admiring in print, not to get lost amongst the sea of online ‘content’.
Both Joshua and I write comics that give readers a glimpse into the animal kingdom and I love seeing how our interpretations of the same world can differ, through our comedic voices and art… and yes, his work is art.
Based on Joshua Barkman's popular webcomic by the same name, False Knees is animal humor taken to a very absurd, darkly delightful place.
In Barkman's debut print collection, False Knees fans will find old favorites along with an abundance of all-new material. Featuring creatures found in the author's native Ontario, this always sharp, sometimes head-scratchingly bizarre collection of comics offers a view into the secret, surprisingly insightful world of blue jays, squirrels, geese, wolves, and rabbits.
Reading with your kid can be a delight, but it’s tough to find a book that both grown-up and child think is hysterical. I mean, I tried reading Catch-22 to my three-year-old, but for some reason the incisive social commentary just didn’t resonate with her. My kids and I both let out genuine chuckles and guffaws while reading all of these books—an experience that I treasured. These books are all giggly, snickery proof that you don’t have to dumb things down to appeal to a wide age range—a goal that I aim for myself in the children’s books and TV shows that I write.
Oh, wow, this book is like a giant playground for the English language.
Every page is overloaded with jokes that literally go on forever, stories that end up right back where they started, puns and illusions, and poetic pretzel-knots, all illustrated with wild line-drawings and hippie-trippy 1960s colors.
I spent hours getting lost in this book as a child, and my kids loved it just as much as we giggled at the pages together.
A New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book of the Year.
In Arm in Arm, Remy Charlip, the great children’s book author and illustrator, is at his most playful, his zaniest, funniest, and cleverest. He rewrites the rules of riddles, tongue twisters, puns, and performance-based play, or rather, throws all rules out the window. Some pages require turning the book completely around, 360 degrees. A magnifying glass may also be useful. It is a book for kids of all ages.
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