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Interesting.

It's a scientific paper. Think Greg Egan with less plot.

This book is from 2002. As such, it's a good book for its time, but it's hopelessly outdated for 2014. No TLS 1.2, no discussion of containerization, no actor model for concurrency to avoid race conditions, no bcrypt, no discussion of just using /dev/urandom for randomness...

More to the point, there are some disturbing gaps even in the book itself -- for example, it recommends cryptlib for TLS, but cryptlib only supports TLS-PSK, and doesn't do X.509 certificate authentication, so it couldn't do any secure PKI even if you asked it nicely.

The security principles are great, and I think you could write a book on the details of input validation, and on authentication in general, but this isn't that book. Buy something more up to date instead of this.

Also liked it. It's a slow book. Catskinner takes a backseat for most of it, and there's a long slow build up showing the life that James has built up for himself.

There's still frustratingly little development of girlfriend Gloria (why did she make the choices she made? Why is she hanging out with James? How is she that smart?) and Agony takes a distinct turn from Big Bad to bitchy diva queen, but you can't have everything.

One does get the sneaking feeling that James is less of a person than Catskinner's "mask" -- there's just bits missing of out of him that you would expect, and it's something that the other characters comment on. James is okay with Catskinner's actions. Totally okay. Either he's a front, or James isn't as well balanced and presentable everyman of the world as he'd like you to think he is.

I like it. It's like poppy z brite but less silly.

Meh. It's a repeat.

It's The Fermata with robbing banks, shitting in potted plants, and sex police. What's not to like?

Boring and clearly only marginally about dating. It's an economics primer. But accurate, at least.

Very... conventional. Whenever there's something to be said about the economics, the thinking is very much towards a standard transactional model, where women have sex earlier if there are fewer men because the men have more bargaining power.

Oh, and she misunderstands life expectancy rates: "At that time, the average life expectancy at birth was thirty-seven years. If people are not going to live very long, then, as a society, you want them to get onto the serious business of reproduction as early as possible. So average life expectancy (an economic outcome) influences societal norms that govern the age at which sexual debut is acceptable."

This is not how life expectancy rate works. The large rate of infant mortality throws off the curve -- most people made it into their 50s and 60s at least. For an economist and statistician, this should be a given.

I love that nothing makes sense, and that the protagonist is completely out of his depth and doesn't magically turn into James Bond. It... works. It's not huge, but it works.