This book's structure I felt was very irritating. It was one of those things where you have a chronological structure with a lot of diversions into subtopics, which I'm normally okay with, but the subtopics kept leading to further subtopics which might or might not tie back into the main chronology. I found it offputting, and very difficult to know where I was in the story.

But I did clearly grasp the moral of the story which is: any time you ask to do something new and complicated with software, you should accept that it's going to be hard, it's going to take more money and time than you planned to do it (even if you take that idea into account), and that it'll be hard to know when you're done writing the software if you don't have either a fiscal or temporal constraint on your production.

I loved this book! Every chapter had a cliffhanger ending and needless to say, I finished reading the book in less than 2 days!

BLURB
Susan Fletcher, a brilliant mathematician and head of the National Security Agency's (NSA's) cryptography division, finds herself faced with an unbreakable code resistant to brute-force attacks by the NSA's 3 million processor supercomputer. The code is written by Japanese cryptographer Ensei Tankado, a sacked employee of the NSA, who is displeased with the agency's intrusion into people's privacy.

Tankado auctions the algorithm on his website, threatening that his accomplice "North Dakota" will release the algorithm for free if he dies. Tankado is found dead in Seville, Spain. Fletcher, along with her fiancé, David Becker, a skilled linguist with eidetic memory, must find a solution to stop the spread of the code.

At least with the other three, you got the impression that Brown had done some research - this is just...tripe.

Another fun action read from Dan Brown.

Disappointing after reading Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons. Seemed hurriedly written and not really well thought out. Had promise, but not well executed.