It should be read all year round, but for me personally, fall and winter are the time to light the fireplace, make some tea and curl up under the blanket with a good book. I just finished reading two of these books and I think you might enjoy them too. While one directly concerns Apple, the other concerns the world’s most famous hacker. I believe I can inspire you and some of you will turn to one or the other of these books because both are worth reading.
Odyssey of Pepsi and Apple –John Sculley
The book The Odyssey of Pepsi and Apple is the only book in the world written by one of the CEOs of the Apple company. Unlike those of Steve Jobs or Tim Cook, these are not biographies that talk 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 experience John Sculley’s story with him over the 400 pages of this book. The book was published in 1994, 30 years ago, which is incredible, and covers the period 10 years before its publication. John Sculley took over as CEO of Apple in 1983 and didn’t leave until 1993, just a year before this book saw the light of day. It is unique in that it depicts history as it actually happened. You will learn who Steve Jobs was, how he behaved, how he dressed, how he behaved and what kind of person he really was. You will learn about the period when Apple was not doing well and no one really knew what to do to make the company what it is today. You learn about John Sculley and maybe change your mind about him, even though he actually fired Steve Jobs from his own company, but four hundred pages tell you that you probably would too.
If for you Apple is more than the phone or computer on which you are currently reading this article, then the book Odyssey from Pepsi k Apple the best way to look back on the most tumultuous period of this company and make it part, if only in the pages of a book. In addition, thanks to the first person narration, it is very readable and you will devour word after word and suddenly you will realize that you are at the end. However, you will also notice that thanks to it you have experienced a long and, in my opinion, the most interesting stage of society. Apple. As we already mentioned, the book is already 30 years old today and can only be found in bookstores or second-hand bookstores, which is where I got it from, but the little effort to find it definitely worth it, because it’s an incredible read.
Half a Life on Kevin – Tsutomu Shimomura and John Markoff
Kevin Mitnick is a book written by two angry guys who were hacked into their personal secure systems by Kevin Mitnick. If they were mere mortals, this probably wouldn’t be too surprising, but Tsumomu Shimomura was considered the top systems security expert in the United States at the time, and so the war between the two men began. and the world’s most famous hacker, Kevin Mitnick, started. . For me personally, Kevin is an absolute legend. He is the first person in the world to be convicted of cybercrime and the whole trial was basically about whether there was anything to convict him of when he had not committed any physical crime. The book chronicles the struggle of two of the top computer security experts of the time, each standing on a different side of the barricade. Additionally, Tsumomu realized that the fact that Mitnick could access his system meant that he could access the systems containing the most sensitive data in the world, and that is why he declared Mitnick a personal battle.
In the book you will learn that Mitnick was basically not a great hacker when it came to writing codes and programming, but he was an incredibly smart guy who was able to use the fact that he was smarter than others, that he had charisma. and could get people to do what he needed. This is why Kevin Mitnick is more often called a social engineer than a classic hacker. And that’s what the whole book is about, because it shows what Kevin was really capable of and what was often just the stupidity of others who, at the time Kevin was committing his crimes, were completely unaware of the value of the information that ‘they had themselves. he was often told that this was the case. The book occasionally uses technical terms, parts of Unix commands, and is generally written in a style that requires you to have at least a basic understanding of what Mitnick actually did. However, if you have it, you will definitely enjoy it. In the original the book is called Takedown, and if you want you can still buy it as a regular print book on Amazon for example. If I’m not mistaken and feel free to correct me, the book was never published in Czech, but in Slovak under the title Polovačka na Kevina. I opted for this Slovak version, which is more difficult to read than the English version, 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 in an old bookstore or, as I found it, in a bookstore.
