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From the opening line of his breakthrough cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson plunges the reader into a not-too-distant future. It is a world where the Mafia controls pizza delivery, the United States exists as a patchwork of corporate-franchise city-states, and the Internet--incarnate as the Metaverse--looks something like last year's hype would lead you to believe it should. Enter Hiro Protagonist--hacker, samurai swordsman, and pizza-delivery driver. When his best friend fries his brain on a new designer drug called Snow Crash and his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, what's a guy with a name like that to do? He rushes to the rescue. A breakneck-paced 21st-century novel, Snow Crash interweaves everything from Sumerian myth to visions of a postmodern civilization on the brink of collapse. Faster than the speed of television and a whole lot more fun, Snow Crash is the portrayal of a future that is bizarre enough to be plausible. ... Read more

Reviews (439)

Stephenson's unique
Snow Crash is one of those books that will either grab you in the first 30 pages, and hold you to the end, or you will hate.You'll worry about the comic book aspect at first, but quickly get past that.

As with much of Neal Stephenson's writing, Snow Crash is completely unique.It is hilarious through the first half of the book, and has a couple of Stephenson's amazing allegories sprinkled throughout.One in particular describing a Dilber-view of a future Federal bureaucracy is worth the price of the book on it's own.Snow Crash is not, however, at the level of Cryptonomicon.The world of Snow Crash seriously bogs down and becomes Hollywood-movie-clichéd at the end.But it's a great ride getting there.

Will It Ever End??!?!?!
My gosh, what a complete waste of time.I finally put the book down after 6 weeks and 273 pages.I just couldn't take it anymore.I would have stopped a long time before now, but I don't like leaving books unfinished.In this case, not finishing is better than the alternative...

Nothing every really happened in the book, at least not the part I read.There were a few scenes where something actually transpired besides dialog or author rambling, but the scenes were shallow and short.

I kept waiting for some big event to take place after all the description, but over half way through the book, it never did.I just feel like I wasted the last 5 weeks trying to get through this book, when normally it takes me only a week to get through one that can keep my attention.

I was not impressed.

something for a Jerry Bruckheimer film, but that's all...
From what I heard, this was meant to be up there with Neuromancer, but it didn't even come close in my opinion.

After [what seemed like] the first three or four times Stephenson explains to the reader that computers understand binary, and that binary is made up of 1's and 0's, I started to get a bit worried about this novel.

I continued though, thinking that he was just educating the computer illiterate in the early chapters, but it just went on and on...

The whole thing just seemed to be made up of a mish-mash of 'cool' images like hackers, samurai, the Mafia, skateboarding, etc, etc, etc... All just thrown into the mix for the sake of being cool.

The only interesting thread of an idea in the book just sort of trailed off into nothingness, just like the rest of the story.

I give it one star for the mythological storyline [which was the only thing that kept me reading], and for resisting the urge to write the protagonist from the first person. Everything else just annoyed me.

If you're after a cyber-novel with genuinely creative ideas (not just a Neuromancer wannabe), try Permutation City (Greg Egan). ... Read more

Isbn: 0553380958
Subjects: 1. American Science Fiction And Fantasy 2. Fiction 3. Fiction - Science Fiction 4. Science Fiction 5. Science Fiction - General 6. Science Fiction - High Tech 7. Fiction / Science Fiction / General

$11.20

Neuromancer (Ace Science Fiction)
by William Gibson
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Paperback (10 July, 2000)
list price: $13.95 -- our price: $11.16
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Editorial Review

Here is the novel that started it all, launching the cyberpunk generation, and the first novel to win the holy trinity of science fiction:the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award andthe Philip K. Dick Award.With Neuromancer, William Gibson introduced the world to cyberspace--and science fiction has never been the same.

Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway--jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way--and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld.Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance--and a cure--for a price.... ... Read more

Reviews (366)

My first excursion into the world of Cyberpunk
This is the book that helped start the cyber punk genre (written in 1985 for crying-out-loud), written in a stream of thought style (don't worry it's no Finnegan's Wake) that can be hard to follow at times. If you're used to reading authors such as Philip K. Dick this should be no problem for you.

A hacker, Case, double crosses an employer who then destroys the neurons that enable his cyberspace travel. A new employer with a dubious background offers to fix the supposedly irreversible damage in exchange for an even more dubious job. The books break-neck pace lasts through the whole book; reading it is like drinking five double espressos and playing Rez on PlayStation 2 till three A.M.

I can recommend this to erudite readers who have yet to enter the Cyberpunk arena. I know I'll be reading more soon.

Importent book, but not always interesting
It took me a while to get to this book but finally I got around to read it, it's definitely a very ground breaking book in both his vision of the future and perception of the internet even though it was written way before the internet took such a massive part of our life. It's interesting to see how terms that were invented as science fiction are starting to have a functional use in our like such as "cyberspace".

What I also love about this book is that urban feeling, that type of sleazy dark high tec cities that always crawling with passion, crime and action. I just moved back to the city after 10 month in the suburbs and reading this book at this point in my life reminded me why I hated the suburbs so much, it made me feel very connected to the whole city experience and to living in this post modern world.

What's a bit of a pity for me is that Gibson's incredible perception about cities and technologies doesn't transfer to the way he wrote about people, and so the characters are really shallow and not very interesting, their emotional progress through the book's pretty non existing and they are basically very caricature images of cinematic super heroes, villains and outlaws. It could be that the reason I felt it to be so was that those character was quoted in so many other movies an books (Matrix, Bland runner, Ghost in the shell and so on) so that by the time I got to reading their origin they seemed flat and boring, but basically I couldn't find them believable or interesting in any way, I wasn't sad when some of them died or hurt, and that for me is a little turn off in a book.

All and all I enjoyed it a lot and the experience of living for a few weeks (and maybe more) in William Gibson's city was a very profound and interesting experience.

Entertaining, but completely shallow
Hot chicks with bio-mod razor nails? Shallow characters, shallow world. None of the humor, quirkiness, and philosophical insights as authors like Philip K. Dick, Lem, or Alfred Bester. Mostly style, very little substance. If Cyberpunk were a type of Rock & Roll it'd be 80's glam, lipstick & hair bands. Oodles of D&D Nerd 'Cool Factor'with hardly the philosophical intrigue of the highly derivative Matrix trilogy. While I'm sure this is blasphemy to the cyberpunk fans everywhere, the chip on my shoulder left by books like Neuromancer and Snow Crash is taking Geek Chic at face value, and realizing there's nothing behind the curtain--nothing beneath the sunken eyes of drug addicts and biotech junkies.

More deserving of a comic book than a novel! Then again, I can see why this would have had more impact in the 1980s when it was originally published. ... Read more

Isbn: 0441007465
Subjects: 1. Business intelligence 2. Computer hackers 3. Fiction 4. Fiction - Science Fiction 5. Information superhighway 6. Nervous system 7. Science Fiction 8. Science Fiction - General

$11.16

Cryptonomicon
by Neal Stephenson
Average Customer Review:

Paperback (02 May, 2000)
list price: $16.00 -- our price: $10.88
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Editorial Review

Neal Stephenson enjoys cult status among science fiction fans and techie types thanks to Snow Crash, which so completely redefined conventional notions of the high-tech future that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if his cyberpunk classic was big, Cryptonomicon is huge... gargantuan... massive, not just in size (a hefty 918 pages including appendices) but in scope and appeal. It's the hip, readable heir to Gravity's Rainbow and the Illuminatus trilogy. And it's only the first of a proposed series--for more information, read our interview with Stephenson.

Cryptonomicon zooms all over the world, careening conspiratorially back and forth between two time periods--World War II and the present. Our 1940s heroes are the brilliant mathematician Lawrence Waterhouse, cryptanalyst extraordinaire, and gung ho, morphine-addicted marine Bobby Shaftoe. They're part of Detachment 2702, an Allied group trying to break Axis communication codes while simultaneously preventing the enemy from figuring out that their codes have been broken. Their job boils down to layer upon layer of deception. Dr. Alan Turing is also a member of 2702, and he explains the unit's strange workings to Waterhouse. "When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first.... Of course, to observe is not its real duty--we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed.... Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious."

All of this secrecy resonates in the present-day story line, in which the grandchildren of the WWII heroes--inimitable programming geek Randy Waterhouse and the lovely and powerful Amy Shaftoe--team up to help create an offshore data haven in Southeast Asia and maybe uncover some gold once destined for Nazi coffers. To top off the paranoiac tone of the book, the mysterious Enoch Root, key member of Detachment 2702 and the Societas Eruditorum, pops up with an unbreakable encryption scheme left over from WWII to befuddle the 1990s protagonists with conspiratorial ties.

Cryptonomicon is vintage Stephenson from start to finish: short on plot, but long on detail so precise it's exhausting. Every page has a math problem, a quotable in-joke, an amazing idea, or a bit of sharp prose. Cryptonomicon is also packed with truly weird characters, funky tech, and crypto--all the crypto you'll ever need, in fact, not to mention all the computer jargon of the moment. A word to the wise: if you read this book in one sitting, you may die of information overload (and starvation). --Therese Littleton ... Read more

Reviews (726)

If you're gonna read this book,
Then you need to ask yourself a something. Do you I have a short attention span? If you do, please stick to watching sitcoms and leave the reading to us vertebrates. The Cryptonomicons time line is non-linear, with each successive chapter taking place at a different location and following a different character. So, if your gonna read this, know that there are many names, places and dates that are going to be crucial to you getting the most out of this book- If you can't be bothered to remember what happened last week on "Will & Grace" don't bother with this book. For god's sake, don't write a review if you read the first couple of pages and decide, "This sucks, it makes me look like a dork when I carry it around and it's heavy too".

With that said, I can honestly say that, apart from about 20 pages of mathematics that I could not fully understand, this was one of the most idea fill and interesting books I've laid my hands on in some time. Stephenson may be a genius of DaVinci proportion, if not that, then at least a teacher of Feynman's caliber.

An exhaustingly amazing novel
I read a lot, a whole lot. I first read this monster from the library the month it came out, decided (after I had recovered from the experience) that it was probably the best thing I'd read in the whole of the `90s, went out and bought a hardback for myself, and set it in a place of honor on my shelves. Nearly six years on, I find that aging has only improved it. I've been working my way slowly through his recent trilogy, but Cryptonomicon is still better. His characters exist in a t least five dimensions and will stick with you from a long, long time. There's Lawrence Waterhouse, math prodigy and buddy of Alan Turing, who becomes one of the key codebreakers of World War II. There's Marine raider Bobby Shaftoe, a survivor of everything the war can throw at him -- except heroism. There's Randy Waterhouse, Lawrence's equally nerdy grandson, master Unix hacker, and generally nice guy. There's America Shaftoe, partly-Filipino granddaughter of Bobby, master deep diver, and all-round tough cookie -- which doesn't keep Randy and Amy from falling in love. There's Avi, Randy's best friend and front-man in all their business ventures -- in this case, building the world's first politically independent data haven, much to the dismay of major governments. There's Lieut. Goto Dengo, engineer for the Nipponese army and builder of the primary hiding place of Japan's stolen billions in gold bullion. And, moving like mist between the two separate generations, there's the _eminence gris_ Enoch Root, Catholic priest, doctor, cryptographer, conspirator, and take-no-prisoners philosopher. Add to this list several dozen supporting players, all equally well realized, and the richness of the narrative texture is unbelievable. Besides the sheer enjoyment you get from Stephenson's Roman-candle style, his highly original metaphors and similes, and his ironic sense of humor, you're gonna learn a lot about cryptography (both the wartime vintage and the present-day digital variety), and about irregular warfare, and a score of other subjects. Yes, it's a huge book -- but it has to be. The heft also allows space for the author's sprawling digressions on topics as diverse as jungle survival, the similarities between computers and church organs, granny-grade furniture, U-boat life, several Holocausts, imprinting of sexual fetishes, Finnish psychology, the neuro-sociological origins of the ancient Greek pantheon, how to divide up an inheritance, the socioeconomic underpinnings of paper currency, and the proper way to eat Cap'n Crunch. It doesn't all advance the plot, but don't worry about it. Every single paragraph in this thing is worth reading, savoring, and storing away for later rethinking. I'll be reading it against in another decade.

Fun for everyone -- not just the hacker community....
Hey, I did my time working in the computing universe -- as a "DEC-10" operator, an "engineering aide" on work study, a UNIX documentation technical editor (for industry, NOT those semi-literate hackers who wrote the BSD manuals, thanks!) and a programmer in Pascal, C and FORTRAN -- but computers still remain glorified and troublesome _appliances_ in my view. So, a 918-page(!) book about hackers had better have more going on than elaborate self-aggrandizement to keep my interest.This story goes well beyond your usual cyberpunk novel, by fully engaging the larger context in which the techno-wizardry occurs.We get to learn lots of fascinating back story involving (real or imagined) events from World War II, bringing home the recognition that the Web and all of our taken-for-granted computer hardware did not come into existence from vacuum.All of this information is woven into stories about very interesting people, whose lives you either envy or recognize as not so very different from your own, after all.I understand that Bobby Shaftoe and friends are present some of Stephenson's other books, and I'll be looking for them.To echo a previous reviewer, I do hope, though, to see more fully-realized female characters in Stephenson's future work.Say, one with a Ph.D. and a sense of adventure, but not necessarily built like an Olympic athlete or with Heinlein-esque inflated breasts? ... Read more

Isbn: 0380788624
Subjects: 1. Espionage/Intrigue 2. Fiction 3. Fiction - Espionage / Thriller 4. Historical - General 5. Technological

$10.88

Introduction to the Theory of Computation
by Michael Sipser
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Hardcover (13 December, 1996)
list price: $103.95 -- our price: $103.95
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Editorial Review

"Intended as an upper-level undergraduate or introductory graduate text in computer science theory," this book lucidly covers the key concepts and theorems of the theory of computation. The presentation is remarkably clear; for example, the "proof idea," which offers the reader an intuitive feel for how the proof was constructed, accompanies many of the theorems and a proof. Introduction to the Theory of Computation covers the usual topics for this type of text plus it features a solid section on complexity theory--including an entire chapter on space complexity. The final chapter introduces more advanced topics, such as the discussion of complexity classes associated with probabilistic algorithms. ... Read more

Reviews (39)

An excellent one-semester intro to theory of computation
The theory of computation represents a fascinating landscape that intersects computer science and mathematics and can be roughly divided into three overlapping areas: automata and formal languages, computability theory, and computational complexity. And there is enough interesting knowledge about each area to fill three books, each twice the size of this one. And because of this I find it remarkable that the author has succeeded in filling a slim volume with the essential theory and results from each area, in a style that not only seems very accessible and intuitive, but also demonstrates important relationships between the three areas. For example, most books on computability theory do not discuss automata outside of Turing machines, but in his book Sipser elegantly proves that the equivalence problem is decidable for deterministic finite automata, but undecidable for pushdown automata.

Not only does the author have very good coverage of the three areas, but he also is able to strike a nice balance between mathematical rigor and intuitive understanding. His "proof idea" proof preambles greatly helped my students better understand the main ideas behind each result. In terms of coverage I found only a handful of introductory topics that were neglected: Greibach Normal Form, Rice and Rice-Shapiro Theorems, algebraic aspects of formal languages, Turing degrees, and perhaps context sensitive languages. With that said, remember that this book is just a semester-long introduction to a vast landscape. I recommend the following books for more depth: Peter Linz, "Introduction to Formal Languages and Automata"; Nigel Cutland, "Introduction to Computability Theory"; Christos Papadimitriou, "Computational Complexity".

Another strength of the book is how the author distinguishes exercises and problems: "exercises" are similar to the worked out examples, and can be solved by following one of the presented examples, algorithms or theorems, while "problems" require significant expository writing and deeper insight. Most undergraduates should be able to handle the exercises, but will find the problems very challenging if not impossible, due to the fact that students at this level are mostly familiar with problems that can be solved in a few steps by following some algorithm. So these problems have the capability of developing student intellect, but if assigned in too large a quantity can break the spirit of the developing student. Have care!

I congratulate Dr. Sipser on this fine book. May it inspire millions of readers to question the meaning of computation and explore its possibilities and limitations.

misleading
yeah, sure, Sipser manages to pack a lot of difficult stuff into a small book and makes it seem easy. think again, you'll find that's because he's not telling you the whole story! a lot of interesting materials are just skipped. For example, Greibach normal form of CFG is nowhere seen in the book, which makes Sipser's explaining of converting CFG to NPDA (lemma 2.13) very uninteresting. Compare with lecture 24 in Kozen's book, you'll see the difference. This book also lacks examples. Without seeing enough examples, you justwon't grasp the concepts firmly. That's mainly the reason why the exercises and problems seem so difficult.

I recommend Kozen's "Automata and Computability", Hopcroft and Ullman's "automata, languages, computation" and Papadimitriou's"computational complexity". but not this one.

readable and concise
Prof. Sipser gives a fabulous introduction to theoretical computer science.His clear and concise proofs are preceding by "Proof Ideas" that give a non-technical overview of the proof to follow.This makes the proofs far easier to follow.He strikes a perfect balance between concise mathematics and eloquent exposition, so the book neither intimidates the novice student nor bores the seasonsedmathematician.This is a model computer science/mathematics textbook! ... Read more

Isbn: 053494728X
Subjects: 1. Advanced 2. Computational complexity 3. Computer Bks - General Information 4. Discrete Mathematics 5. General 6. Logic 7. Machine Learning 8. Machine theory 9. Mathematics 10. Science/Mathematics 11. Systems Analysis 12. Computers / Information Theory

$103.95

Computer Organization and Design Second Edition : The Hardware/Software Interface
by David A. Patterson, John L. Hennessy
Average Customer Review:

Hardcover (01 August, 1997)
list price: $89.95 -- our price: $89.95
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Editorial Review

This textbook provides a basic introduction to the fundamentals of current computer designs. As the title suggests, the text skirts the border between hardware and software. After an overview of the subject and a discussion of performance, the book launches into technical matter such as instruction sets, how they are constrained by the underlying processor hardware, the constraints on their design, and more. An excellent critique of computer arithmetic methods leads to a high-level discussion on processor design. Following is a great introduction to pipelining, nice coverage of memory issues, and solid attention to peripherals. The book concludes with a brief discussion of the additional issues inherent in multiprocessing machines. The extremely lucid description is grounded in real-world examples. Interesting exercises help reinforce the material, and each section contains a write-up of the historical background of each idea. Computer Organization and Design is accessible to the beginner, but also offers plenty of valuable knowledge for experienced engineers. ... Read more

Reviews (48)

Verbose, boring, disorganized and skips important concepts.
This book starts off nicely and explains some of the basics of assembly programming (empasis on MIPS). Some of the arithematic stuff is a little out of its place and the authors skip important concepts (which I had to learn online). It has a fairly decent introduction to MIPS architecture. But right after the first few chapters - starting from caches, virtual memory and I/O this books starts to get really really disorganized and confusing. The chapter or caches and virtual memory will bore you and you'll end up spending 3-4 hours reading and giving yourself a big headache. I think topics like caches and vm need more diagrams for better understanding. Since lot of stuff happens in parallel in caches and vm's, its actually hard to understand what the authors are trying to convey from those chapters. I totally skipped those topics and studied them from elsewhere. I wouldn't want to recommend this book for students intending to go for into to computer architecture, but since this is the only book which covers all the topics, we don't have a much of a choice.

One of the better texts on hardware
If you have to use this book in a college course and you are not directed to do so, download the SPIM simulator (MIPS spelled backwards) the author mentions in the book. This can help you understand some of the more complex topics.

The reason I gave the book four stars is because the topic of pipelining as introduced in the book is confusing and may require most readers to go back over the topic several times before it clicks.

I also think that having a course in digital fundamentals prior to taking a course that requires this book would help, too. It used to be that colleges would require undergrad computer science students to take a digital fundamentals course (or equivalent) before taking and organization class. It seems now that many schools have dropped the digital requirement and have students take one computer organization class. If you fit in this boat, maybe thing about picking up a Schaum's outline on digital design concepts to go along with this book.

Very boring and tedious to read!!
This book has a good potential in teaching students about computer organization. Unfortunately, the authors spend too much time explaining simple concepts which makes the book very boring and tedious to read. For example: the authors spend 335 pages just to explain basic MIPS assembly languages and computer performance. Those concepts could have been explained in 50 pages at most. Giving too much unnecessary detail won't help me to get a better understanding of computer organization. In fact, I get lost because the main topic was buried inside all the unimportant unnecessary details. This book could have been written in 300 pages, which is about a third of the length of the book, and still gives a clear, to the point, concise explanation of computer organization. ... Read more

Isbn: 1558604286
Subjects: 1. Computer Architecture 2. Computer Architecture - General 3. Computer Bks - General Information 4. Computer Books: General 5. Computer Design 6. Computer Engineering 7. Computer interfaces 8. Computer organization 9. Computers 10. Reference - General 11. Computers / Computer Architecture

$89.95

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