A page turner, but not up to par

Unfortunately for "Digital Fortress", I heard about Dan Brown from his two most recent blockbusters, "Angels & Demons" and "Da Vinci Code", and thus I read those two before I picked up "Digital Fortress". I believe if I had read his older work first, I would have been more happy with it, and even more excited when I saw the growth into his most recent works.

The story was entertaining, and dabbled in topics with which I am familiar (security and privacy). This made me tear through it, but it required some major suspension of disbelief on my part. His liberal use of invented computer science, along with five-year-old technologies and ideas was less than satisfying to someone in the CS field. However, there are many books that I have thoroughly enjoyed that I have no technical knowledge about yet have been fascinated by. Similarly, I believe that someone NOT firmly grounded in bits and bytes will enjoy this book for its fast paced story.

The technical aspects aside, this book is still not up to par with Brown's more recent books. His thoughts aren't as well expressed, and some of the sentences and paragraphs are just...tacky. However, Brown's famous 2 page chapters lend themselves well to being read one after the other after the other, and before you know it, you are closing the book.

The plot and twists are well planned as usual. Brown is excellent at switching back and forth between three or four characters in their own mini stories without losing the reader in any of the intermingling details. Regardless that I thought I had Brown nailed on some detail every now and then, each is wrapped up nicely by the end of the story. A good deal of hand-holding is done in the final few minutes of the excitement, a slight misjudgment in my opinion: Brown should have given his reader's sleuthing a little more credit at the finale.

A fun read, but don't expect great things.

He needed a computer tech advisor

There are so many inaccuracies in this book that it makes it difficult to keep reading. It gives a new slant to The Da Vinci Code. If that's as full of errors as this one, then the Catholic Church can rest its concerns.

I could enumerate them, but this book isn't worth the time or effort. I'm sorry I bought it.

Should be a best seller!!!

This is the fourth book of Dan Brown that I read for the star given here. This book must his first novel. To my delight plus surprise, this book is great, definiteltly better than Deception Point which the last scene of attempting to rescue the heroin from the Triton reads like fake, and too cliche.

It is believable that TRANSLTR could break a 64-bit key or crack a 128-bit key in less than 6 hours, because it is a parallel computing machine of millions of processors.

As great as Da Vinci Code but less filling.