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Second this. Fantastic book about true events. If you like the story, there is also a movie which covers the same events as the book. The movie is called "23" and is available in German and English.
I know the movie as 'The KGB, the computer, and me': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcKxaq1FTac
"Stealing the network" series by Ryan Russel is awesome. - Stealing the Network: How to Own the Box - Stealing the Network: How to Own a Continent - Stealing the Network: How to Own an Identity - Stealing the Network: How to Own a Shadow
I see people's mentioned Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" - while I loved "diamond age" and like "snowcrash" - I much prefer Singh's "the codebook" on a similar theme. Thrilling non-fiction.
On the more fiction side, I enjoyed Bruce Sterling's "The Zenith Angle" a lot.
And second the recommendations for Mitnick's books - both the autobiography "ghost in the wires" and the more free form "made up examples" in "the art of deception" (like many of the stories in the stealing the network books, "inspired" by true events...).
Other than that there's of course: https://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
(and to a lesser extent "homeland").
And others mentioned the non-fiction book detailing operation sun devil:
"THE HACKER CRACKDOWN Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier", Bruce Sterling
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/101
[ed: I think maybe "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge deserves a mention too. And maybe "speed of Dark" by Elizabeth Moon]
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Completely agree. Everything is possible in it. If there was indeed someone who had a far surpassed genius level of IQ and tech know how, and dedicated hours of their time to developing the stuff with an unlimited budget (which basically is what Matthew Sobol supposedly has) then I could easily understand how a lot of things in that book could become reality. Either way - a fun read and a good book to re-visit. One o…
Looking back on it now, I think the one thing that's really not plausible is the idea that someone could write a system that can anticipate anything that can happen. It was a little too Foundation/Psychohistory for me. But it was still a fantastic novel, I loved reading it, and will probably re-read it again and again.
There are some great books on this thread! I've read a bunch of them and going to come back for more.
In a hard SF rather than contemporary context, A Deepness in the Sky , by Vernor Vinge, is an absolute delight (and a Hugo winner for best novel). Vinge was a mathematics and computer science professor, and very much knows what he's talking about. Part of the fun is that, on a 5000 year old spaceship set arbitrarily far in our future, long past the end of Moore's Law, all the systems are still running Unix. And one o…
Halting State by Charlie Stross
There was originally supposed to be a third novel in this series, but Stross cancelled it[0] after Edward Snowden.
"Halting State" wasn't intended to be predictive when I started writing it in 2006. Trouble is, about the only parts that haven't happened yet are Scottish Independence and the use of actual quantum computers for cracking public key encryption (and there's a big fat question mark over the latter—what else are the NSA up to?).
I'm throwing in the towel. I probably will write another near-future Scottish police procedural by and by, but it won't be a sequel to the first two except in the loosest sense. The science fictional universe of "Halting State" and "Rule 34" is teetering on the edge of turning into reality. Meanwhile, the financial crisis of 2007 forced me back to the drawing board for "Rule 34"; the Snowden revelations have systematically trashed all my ideas for the third book.
[0] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/psa-why-...
Two books come to mind (while excluding the obvious absolute classics like Neuromancer (William Gibson) and Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson): "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson. It goes from WW2 to modern time. "Cyberpunk" by Katie Hafner - Read it aeons ago so working from long term memory. 3 real world stories of famous hackers and their "crimes" (Kevin Mitnick, Pengo, Robert Morris).
I recently read Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick and it was fantastic! He talks about his journey and evasion of the FBI while he was on the run
Afterwards gamedec series changes style and pace, still okay but no longer detective work.