Find out how Kevin Mitnick went from a being a phone and computer hacker to why he needed to have multiple identities to evade capture by the FBI. The U.S. authorities believed that he could telephone NORAD and launch nuclear weapons just by whistling down the receiver.

The book is better and more gripping than any work of fiction because, well, most crime authors always manage to screw up the technical details.

What is surprising is the amount of social engineering involved. If you phoned someone and asked for a password they’d be suspicious. If you asked if the ‘admin’ password was ‘abc123’, the same as it was last week, the victim would most likely tell you the current password. The amount of information he was able to collect just by appearing as if he was a fellow employee trying to get the job done was astonishing. Why wouldn’t you want to help someone?

At least now I can watch Freedom Downtime without it spoiling the book.

If you like this then another great technical thriller is The Cuckoo’s Egg.

A series of anecdotes, that originally appeared on folklore.org, detailing the creation of the original Apple Macintosh computer.

I was impressed that so few people actually worked on the software and hardware. It did seem to be less than 20 in total, at least that’s about how many people had their signatures on the inside of the case.

It is amazing what people can achieve. They were working late, working weekends and pulling all nighters fuelled by chocolate coated espresso beans to get it all working before the launch date.

While I was reading the book I kept thinking that I’d love to read a similar book written by the people who developed the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Considering Apple’s policy on secrecy I can’t see it happening.

To think that Steve wanted to call it Bicycle instead of Macintosh.

I can’t remember getting a book on the day of it’s release. For this Steve Jobs biography I had the iBook on my iPad 20 minutes into the day of publication. Isn’t technology wonderful.

Before I even owned any of Apple’s hardware I read Apple Confidential so I knew how the company was started. I had also bought iWoz when that was published and I have a copy of The Pirates of Silicon Valley. So the first half of the book, up until Steve’s departure from Apple, I knew about, but of course not from Steve himself.

It was only when he formed NeXT and Pixar that things really started to get interesting for me. I never owned any machine before the 2nd generation iMac, which can now be called the ‘sunflower’ iMac, this was the start of Mac OS X. I heard that he could brutal when delivering his opinion of the work within Apple if it wasn’t up to his exacting standard. But reading the book I did start to think that he was just a complete sod (a British term of endearment). He did seem to relish belittling people, making them uncomfortable, but in the end, he did get results, he got the best out of people.

Steve must have been a difficult to live with. The headquarters for Pixar took less time to complete than the kitchen at home. As a family they spent ages trying to find exactly the right washing machine. When he was in hospital he complained about the oxygen mask and the monitor on his finger, saying that they were both badly designed.

Throughout his life he had been on these strange diets. Only eating fruit one minute, only eating carrots the next. As his health was failing the family employed a part-time cook to prepare meals. Steve said that he fancied pumpkin pie, this was prepared from scratch and an hour later he had two mouthfuls. That was considered an achievement as he usually considered most food to be inedible.

The really sad thing is that when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer he didn’t want to be operated on, he thought that the cancer would go away if he ate certain types of food. This is the same man who was involved in creating some of the iconic hardware and software in the first decade of the 21st century: iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iTunes and also Apple’s retail stores, and one of the most influential animation studios, Pixar.

The biography is truly warts and all. In the later chapters Steve tells Walter that he wishes that he’d handled certain situations differently. Maybe he had been thinking a lot about the past as he knew that he only had a limited time left. Steve told Walter Isaacson that the biography was for his children so they they could see why he wasn’t always there for them.

I really can’t see there being another person like Steve Jobs. Someone who has a laser like focus on making great products like that.

I still can’t quiet believe that he’s gone.