To Seek Truth, and Perhaps Find It
My Favorite Books - In the Order I Read Them
- Cryptonomicon
- Author: Neal Stephenson
- This is the book that sparked my interest in cybersecurity. I tried reading this when I was 10 years old but stopped because I couldn't understand it. It sat on my parent's bookshelf until I rediscovered it in 2021. It subsequently hooked me. My all-time favorite book.
- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
- Author: Yuval Noah Harari
- I read this one in my sister-in-law's family home in Chennai. This book opened my eyes to the power of a society's worldview on how it engages with its environment and the world, case in point is the age of exploration. It also reminded me of the inter-relationship between human society and its technologies. For example, humans cultivated crops which enabled a move away from hunting and gathering which freed human labor for other tasks. However once the hunting and gathering knowledge was lost we became dependant on crops. In a sense crops domesticated us. My father once told me, "that we become slaves to our own technologies".
- The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage
- Author: Clifford Stoll
- I read this book on the recommendation of my college professor Jeff Lubetsky. Excellent book, the author Clifford Stoll essentially setup his own security operations center to catch a hacker in the 1980s. Many excellent lessons for cybersecurity. In my view Clifford Stoll is the grandfather of civilian cybersecurity.
- A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend them Back
- Author: Bruce Schneier
- Bruce Schneier generalizes the concept of computer hacking to everything, including tax rules, legislative processes and so on. The general usage outside technology is relatively recent in the English language but has existed in other languages for some time. The same concept in Polish is kombinować. One of the most interesting insights in the book is that hacking is a natural evolutionary process by which systems evolve, the primary example being the English common law system by which existing laws are reinterpreted by the courts to set new precedents.
- The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography
- Author: Simon Singh
- A great book that explains cryptography in an accessible way. Placing cryptography in its historical context and illustrating the problems each new cipher solved makes cryptography much easier to understand. In my view, cryptography cannot be understood outside its historical context.
- Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
- Author: Yuval Noah Harari
- Currently reading this one, already one of my favorites.