Review: Rogue Code: A Jeff Aiken Novel

Rogue Code: A Jeff Aiken Novel by Mark Russinovich

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Preordered this for Eur 12,99, this just over my selfset barrier of Eur 10 for most books.
But I really like his style regardless of the flaws. And this one is about high speed trading, which I just avoided during the first internet bubble and now I am slowly trading with part of my retirement money, so I still have some stocks and try to stay current with the IT / Tech News.
While no Day-Traiding expert, I know terms like IPO and have a basic understanding of the stock-market, NYSE and NASDAQ which certainly helps reading this book.

What I really liked, in comparison to books describing IT and Internet tech by other writers, the tech is on the point real. This part may be too much for a normal computer-users, as a former Helpdesk-Slave I consider myself not a Hacker, but a Nerd and an Insider and I use a little (Mac OS) Unix daily.
So I cannot really say how the tech described here works for a non-tech user.

What is obvious to the books before in the series: the writing has matured. Not without faults, I think it is 10-20% too long and jumps too much between the different places. But that is nicely boxed within a chapter, one place per chapter, mostly.
There are a few news-articles, summaries and memos thrown in the story. Some are of real events, the Facebook IPO.

Still, I recommend it, the tech is real and believable and the risks very real.
After the book has ended, there is a section with additional material, both books, articles and urls. This something which I miss in a lot of fictional books, and in this case I will read some of the material on the Web (but probably not the books).



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