Hacker News Reader

Cryptonomicon is on there now; hilariously, it's categorized as "short" in the title.....

Yeah "short" at 918 pages or so.

If ever there was a book that was deeply foundational to the person I’ve grown up into, it was Cryptonomicon. I read it for the first time in middle school.

Same here!

The book that got me back into mathematics and computers, and led me into CS. Can't recommend it enough.

I was surprised that wasn't on there. Seems to me more closely allied with the genre than Diamond Age.

To be fair, Diamond Age does have a solid section where one of the main characters learns all of the fundamentals of computer science, networking, and the foundations of crypto. Pretty good metaphors for absorbing the general concepts are in there.

Hear, hear! DA is my favorite; love the Turing machine castle.

Got to love it when the protagonist is an Emacs user.

Yeah I’m surprised that isn’t on there, given it’s the “hardest” computer fiction of any of his books.