Digital Fortress

This review is for the abridged audiobook

Having read the book Digital Fortress few years ago, I decided to buy the audiobook to listen to in the car. I really enjoyed the book. It's not my favourite Dan Brown, but it's a close third.

There are 3 CDs and the narrator is Bruce Sabbath. He has numerous accents to do as well as umpteen different character voices and on the whole, I thought he did an excellent job of this. The only accent which wasn't believable was that of the French Canadian. The rest, especially the Japanese voices were very believable. I actually thought Bruce Sabbath might be Japanese!

It's a fast paced thriller with the trademark Dan Brown chases and 11th hour escapes from death for the heroes. I give it four stars because I get slightly annoyed with too many death escapes!

Digital Fortress (0/0 people found this helpful)

I had enjoyed other Dan Brown books but this was a spell binder.
I dipped into it before my holiday, past my flight reading it and couldn't wait for the plot to play out.
It was enthralling ! You could not spot the twist and turns in the story.
A fascinating reality of mankinds possible future !!

Not for Geeks (0/0 people found this helpful)

I would just like to say that this Novel and your experience of it will directly relate to how much you know about Computers and Security. Likewise with the Da Vinci Code many scholars would have found it cringeworthy whereas I found it entertaining and interesting - probably because I knew nothing in depth about the subject matter.

As far as Digital Fortress is concerned the author lacks understanding of some of the basic concepts of Computing. The most obvious being the Fetch Execute Cycle and the concept of Static versus Dynamic data. He poses that an Encryption Algorithm could exist which continually updates the key, this is in reality not possible as once a file has been encrypted and the output created the output becomes static data and does not change without some process working on it. Files on your hard drive do not magically change unless a process is working with the file and overrides it.

It took me several months to read this Novel mainly because I would read a chapter then leave it for weeks before returning. This isn't quite so impressive when you realise there are 128 chapters some of which are only a page long and what for? For a stupid Gimmick art the end.

Putting my anger as a programmer aside for a moment, if you do not know much about computers then this book could be quite entertaining and interesting for you to read however I abhor anyone who is seeking to use this as a reference source or to gain an insight into the world of Cryptography. This book is Fiction in its entirety - remember that.

Made for TV (0/0 people found this helpful)

Sometimes, after a hard day's work, all you want to do is sit down in front of the TV with a bowl of Tiramisu and a glass of Ginger Beer and have your mind filled with somethis so mindless that "willing suspension of disbelief" does not do it justice. As long as the explosions are loud and the opposite sex are good looking, then frankly - who cares what its about?

That is the niche this book fills. It is probably best in audio format, as it is best not to tax the brain with actually reading the words. But its an enjoyable romp with preposterous special effects written in set in a fantasy world that only vaguely resembles ours in terms of geography, history or logic.

The plot centres around the idea that - given enough computer power and clever programmers - all encryption can be broken. That is a plot somewhat akin to those plots where people accelerate to light speed and then slow down again and don't have to deal with time dilation. That is to say - the plot is impossible, but fans of trashy pseudo science fiction don't let the laws of mathematics get in the way of a good story.

And from there on there is a downward slide in believability. The only thing you can be sure of is that even the little fact snippets you are given in this text will be guaranteed to be wrong. Dan Brown likes to pass off Urban Legends as fact by putting them in the mouths of clever people. Don't be fooled.

This book is for laughs only. But taken that one it is a good laugh. Give it to computer scientists and watch what colour they turn as they read it. Always good for a laugh.

Better than i expected (1/2 people found this helpful)

This book is actually not DB's worse which a lot of people claim. I thought it was much better than had been claimed and i found it just as good as the rest.

Dan Brown

Reader Reviews:

Good narrator (0/0 people found this helpful)