Reading should be done all year round, but for me personally, autumn and winter are the times when it's best to light a fire, make some tea and snuggle up under a blanket with a good book. I've just finished reading two such books and I believe you might enjoy them too. While one is directly about Applu, the second one is about the most famous hacker in the world. I believe that I may inspire you and some of you will pick up one or the other of these books, because both are worth reading.
Odyssey by Pepsi k Apple – John Sculley
The Odyssey book by Pepsi k Apple is the only book in the world written by one of the company's CEOs AppleUnlike those about Steve Jobs or Tim CookThis is not a biography that tells about someone, but an autobiography written by John Sculley himself and assisted by John Byrne. The book is therefore written as a first-person narrative and you live John Sculley's story on the 400 pages of this book together with him. The book was published in 1994, an incredible 30 years ago, and tells the story of the period 10 years before its publication. John Sculley took the position of CEO Applu in 1983 and left it only in 1993, just a year before this book was published. It is unique in that it describes the story as it really happened. In it you will learn who was Steve Jobs, how he behaved, how he dressed, how he acted and what kind of person he was. You will learn about the period when AppIt wasn't doing well and no one really knew what to do to make the company what it is today. You'll learn about John Sculley and maybe change your mind about him, even though he did fire Steve Jobs from his own company, but after four hundred pages you'll learn that you probably would have done the same.
If it is for you Apple more than just the phone or computer on which you are currently reading this article, then the book Odyssey by Pepsi k Apple the best way to go back to the most tumultuous period of this society and be a part of it, if only in the pages of a book. Moreover, thanks to the narration in the first person, it is very readable and you will be devouring word after word and suddenly you will find that you are at the end of it. However, you will also find that thanks to her you have lived through a long and, from my point of view, the most interesting stage of society Apple. As we already mentioned, the book is already 30 years old today, and you can only find it in second-hand bookshops or bookshops, which is where I got it from, but the little bit of effort in finding it is definitely worth it, because it is an incredible read.
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A Half-Life on Kevin - Tsutomu Shimomura and John Markoff
Half-heartedly for Kevin is a book written by two angry guys whose computers were hacked by Kevin Mitnick and who had access to their personal secure systems. If they were mere mortals, this wouldn't be too surprising, but Tsumomu Shimomuru was considered the best systems security expert in the US at the time, and so a war broke out between the pair and the world's most famous hacker, Kevin Mitnick. Pro To me, Kevin is a legend. He was the first person in the world to be convicted of a cybercrime, and the whole trial was essentially about whether there was anything to convict him of when he had committed no physical crime. The book is about the battle between two of the best computer security experts of the time, each on different sides of the fence. Tsumomu also realized that the fact that Mitnick had been able to get into his system meant that he could get into systems that contained the most sensitive data in the world, and that was why he declared a personal battle with Mitnick.
In the book you will learn that Mitnick was not really a brilliant hacker when it comes to writing codes and programming itself, but he was an incredibly smart guy who simply managed to use the fact that he was smarter than others, had charisma and could get people to do what he needed. This is why Kevin Mitnick was more often called a social engineer than a classic hacker. And that is what the whole book is about, because it shows what Kevin was actually good at and what was often just the stupidity of others who, at the time Kevin was committing his crimes, did not realize at all how valuable the information was, which they often gave him themselves. The book uses technical terms from time to time, parts of Unix commands and overall it is written in a style that requires you to have at least a basic understanding of what Mitnick actually did. However, if you have one, you will definitely enjoy it. In the original, the book is called Takedown and if you want it, you can still buy it in the form of a classic printed book, for example at Amazonu. If I'm not mistaken and feel free to correct me, the book was never published in Czech, but was published in Slovak under the title Polovačka na Kevina. I reached for this Slovak version, which is harder to read than the English one, but due to the limited number of copies, it is personally rarer for me. The Slovak version of the book was published in 1995 and you will have to find it again in a second-hand bookshop or, as I did, on a book sale.
