Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Daemon by Daniel Suarez

I was listening to TWiT (This Week in Technology by Leo Laporte) and everyone highly recommended the book Daemon by Daniel Suarez.  What got my attention on the podcast was the high praise they had for the technical acumen of Daniel Suarez in his writing.  In other words, Daniel Suarez is a true geek :-)

A daemon is computer science terms is a background process that runs all the time.  Daemon is an abbreviation for Disk And Execution MONitor.

I decided to get the 15+ hours unabridged audio book.  This forced me to do some very long bike rides to finish it in just three rides.  I highly recommend this book.  It is 640 pages if you buy it.  The audio version is very well done.  I could honestly see this being made into a movie.  Daemon is a high tech thriller that is based on sound technical details.  This is 5 star (top) book at Borders.  I prefer Borders over Barnes and Noble - no charge to join the Book Club is why...

3 comments:

  1. I've had the book on my Amazon wishlist for a while. I've forgotten how/why I added it; probably a mention on TWIT. It arrived yesterday, along with a couple of inexpensive camera items that pushed the order over $25 (for free shipping). I'd never heard of a "backronym" before reading the wiki page. I think I'm more on board with the Greek mythology version. And yes, I have a BSD 4.4 t-shirt and the 1988 4.3 book (signed by the occasional authors). There are several drawings of the BSD Daemon at mckusick.com/beastie.

    ...Neil

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Neil. It is funny that you mention "backronym", because it was the first time I had ever seen that word as well. I think the Wikipedia author made it up :-) I will be curious if you think this could be a movie when you finish it or if I just enjoyed the book too much and not being realistic.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I finished it yesterday. Fast reading and a "page turner". I enjoyed it and it would make a much better movie than Bullock's "The Net". Reasonable tracking with techie vocabulary was a strong point. The AI's capabilities get a bit far fetched further along, but that's the idea.

    ReplyDelete