Digital Fortress – Dan Brown

I’m still reading my technical books, but not at home. I can’t seem to get into them so I read a fiction novel that has been waiting for me to pick it up. I read through “Digital Fortress” by Dan Brown. It is a book that was given to me during our honeymoon in China from a young woman in our tour group. She had just finished reading it and thought I would like it being an avid reader and programmer. Well…she was right. Although, the story line is a bit far fetched it is an entertaining book. I haven’t read anything else by Dan Brown, but this book keeps you wanting more. Short chapters and he keeps changing perspective to tell the parts of the story that are happening at different places, but at the same time as other events.

The plot of the story is that the NSA has a very large, advanced computer that can break all known encryption methods in 6 minutes on average by using brute force. An enemy of the NSA writes an algorithm that the computer cannot break and the NSA has to struggle with itself and others to prevent it from being released since it will cause chaos throughout the world. The book doesn’t get deep into character development, but I don’t think that it was the author’s intention to develop deep relationships with the characters. The book is a very fast read and there are enough details in the story to keep you reading to see what happens. You can probably read it in a few hours if you don’t stop.

Now that I’m close to the end of reading all my Robert Jordan “Wheel of Time” novels and I finished the bulk of the Dragonlance novels I’m on to reading the “Sword of Truth” series by Terry Goodkind. I’ve heard from a number of people that his first books are very good. Not as complicated as Jordan, but interesting nonetheless. I’m crossing my fingers and will start “Wizard’s First Rule” today. I’ve also heard that Goodkind gets preachy after a few books. I hope that isn’t true; I would like to get into another good series.


One Response to “Digital Fortress – Dan Brown”

  1. Confessor - Terry Goodkind | Xiaoniu 小妞 Says:
    February 14th, 2008 at 6:30 am

    [...] two and a half years ago I started the Sword of Truth seres. Today, eleven books later I finished. When I started out [...]