(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best internet & telecommunications books

> After much contemplation, wonder and imbibing of beverages, I return to thank you.

You should save the contemplation and beverages for when you get the eargear - it's a common witticism among audiophiles that the best upgrade to your system is a higher BAC :P

>On the contrary, this is fascinating! I'm in science writing (nonfiction and fiction), so I get to appreciate this kind of nerdery. It kind of answers this hazy question I have about why does good audio equipment cost so much. We're still sciencing it out, which is cool. I mean, that goes for most technology, so it's not unique, but for me, it's a whole new world.

If you like that, Sean Olive, a fairly major person in most of the above links, [has an infrequently-updated but occasionally pretty neat blog] (http://seanolive.blogspot.com/), and on the heavier end of things his mentor Floyd Toole has a [wonderfully detailed and IMO shockingly readable text on sound from a music/listening standpoint] (https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Loudspeakers-Engineering/dp/113892136X/).

I will say, while there's definitely a component of development/progress being funded here - particularly in headphones, an area which has been seeing both a vast increase in prices and a substantial rise in quality over the past decade or so - I'd also point to two other factors driving high audio equipment prices:

The first is that, in many respects, audio tech develops exceptionally slowly - there were condenser microphones and electrostatic headphones made in the 1960s and 70s that are in many respects comparable to modern high-end equipment, and we haven't got that much more efficient at making them either. Unlike, say, integrated circuits, the core mechanisms of electroacoustic transducers haven't really become smaller, more efficient to make, or higher performance, at least to nearly the same extent, nor have we developed many alternative methodologies - we have better diaphragm materials, stronger magnets, and better assembly processes than in 1920 or 1970, but not to nearly the extent of, say, transistor or capacitor manufacturing, and almost all headphones, speakers, and prior to the smartphone revolution microphones are still the same style of moving coil design that existed at the start of WWI.

This, to some degree, keeps our buying power a bit low compared to what we're used to - I can get a 1980s supercomputer in my pocket for $100, but it's not that much cheaper to make a high-quality headphone now than it was then (and, indeed, some high-end headphones from that era that have persisted since then - Stax's Lambda series, for example, and Beyerdynamic's DT880 - have seen their prices track with inflation for the most part, or in some cases rise).

Of course, I'm neglecting the increasing use of modern technology in some bits of audio tech - digital signal processing, in particular, has immense potential, and has yielded exceptional results in many cases - but that's partially because the field of high-fidelity audio has been comparatively slow to adopt things like digitally controlled speakers and headphones, and where they do exist they tend to in fact be closer to the commodity end of the price range than the high end (and, sadly, they often underperform their potential as a result of this lack of attention).

The second is that the higher end of audio equipment primarily consists of [Veblen goods] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good) - while there are many fine speakers, headphones, amplifiers, and so on available at higher price tags, for decades the highest end of the hobby has been defined at least as much by luxury and status as by actual technical performance. This isn't really that pertinent in the price ranges that sane people talk about - a $100-400 headphone or speaker definitely has some status signalling component for its buyer, but it also just plain costs money to make these things, and often as you climb past the "sold in gas stations" price bracket you see massively diminishing sales volumes, with the attendant loss of economies of scale. That said, outside of "lifestyle/consumer" products, a lot of the field is driven by the eccentricities of the higher end, and when that segment isn't looking for cost reduction (or, in fact, may be looking for the opposite), it has some weird impacts on how resources are allocated and what sorts of products are developed, even outside of the realm of $10k/meter cabling and $200k per pair speakers.

Erm, sorry to ramble at you, but I'm really into this stuff, and sometimes I get carried away.

>Makes sense. Would my unrefined taste buds really appreciate a $1,000 bottle of wine over a $30 one? Probably not.

Oenophiles are a [common comparison point with high-end audio] (http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2012/04/what-we-hear.html), as a matter of fact - although usually from the standpoint of "past a certain point, you aren't really getting more quality" rather than "your palate isn't refined enough" in my experience.

> I have no idea what this means but it got me searching how do brains process sound, good stuff.

It's a really fascinating topic, although I'm mostly hip to the parts that are pertinent to headphone design (my profession) more than the neurological (or physiological in general) side of things - in general, once you get to the eardrum, my job is pretty much done. A lot of weird stuff happens by that point, however - you can spend a fair while just getting your head around how the binaural hearing apparatus lets us locate sounds in three dimensions.

> I think I want a better sound experience, and it's worth it in my situation to invest better in both speakers and headphones. I've actually decided to downgrade to the 3700x build in order to grab better eargear.

I hope that it ends up being worth your while! I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on the gear, if you have any.

You have justified your logic, but, with all due respect, it is flawed. It reminds me of a joke about a scientist that taught a fly to fly on demand, and observed that when he removed it's wings, it went deaf, because it didn't fly on demand anymore!

The human brain is tricked very, very easily. In 1910, Muzak was invented: phycological based music systems! If you have any doubt on how easily the brain can be tricked, PLEASE search for audio myths on reddit and watch and listen to the videos. It will blow your mind, if you believe what you wrote. They demonstrate just how easily the brain is tricked. In fact, you can be talked into hearing things! Fact. The softwares we are speaking of, such as Sonnarworks, measures reflections on a spectral analytic basis, as well as time differences, as well as phase and inversions, natural comb filtering and much, much, much more.

It does, indeed negate the effects of the room, actually better than room treatment, in most cases, so your speakers are indeed sounding as if they are in an anechoic chamber.

>On top of that there is a frequency curve and we perceive different frequencies at different volumes.

It does take into effect the fact that human ears are most sensitive at 1000 hz and the rollouts of the human ear. For headphones, they go as far asking for you to send in your cans, as they measuring each side of YOUR headphones, for they differ, it is that accurate. Andrew Shepps ( if you into audio engineering, you know his pedigree - If you don't, you should) swears by it, as more and more engineers are, and they are in fact using it to mix now - grammy winning mixers using it and swearing by it - I'm not second guessing Schepps and his golden ears. I'm not going to challenge the incredible work Sonnarworks engineers either.

>Throw a digital room correction into the mix and you are now lying to your brain and it can no longer tell fact from fiction.

This is baseless, my friend. High end home theater has been doing this for well over decades with wondrous results, in high end home theater, I'm talking the custom stuff, a point source mic is put at every listening point in the room to correct the room. The before and after is stunning - jaw dropping. The consumer's brain doesn't 'fix it'. Even regular consumer home theater, best buy stuff, has Audyssey MultEQ XT32, LFC, Sub EQ HT, Dynamic Volume and Dynamic EQ. Sonnarworks has taken it to pro level.

>our brain can perceive this room correction and correct for it in the mixing process, because at least your brain is hearing the truth

Our brains lie to us, our brains lie to us every day, for it tries to quickly piece together bits of sounds, and sights, for that matter, and quickly try to come up with something that makes sense. i.e. the man on the moon syndrome: our brains try to do it's best to create a whole picture out of pieces. It does the same to audio. I'm sure you've seen optical illusions. They work extraordinarily well! Sonic illusions do too!

>Your brain can perceive this room correction and correct for it in the mixing process, because at least your brain is hearing the truth.

Now we're getting ridiculous. If this were true, than why do all, as in every one, without exception, of the best mixing and mastering engineers treat their rooms? Because their brains cannot decode the complex array of waves bouncing all over a room.

>Throw a digital room correction into the mix and you are now lying to your brain and it can no longer tell fact from fiction.

Where are you getting this from? You just pulled the wings off the fly! I'm not sure if you can tell fact from fiction, as you are writing baseless fiction, posting it as fact. Are you Trump???

>Digitally correcting a room is imperfect and leads to worse results than the original uncorrected signal.

This is America, you are certainly entitled to your own opinions, but nobody is entitled to their own facts.

I mean no disrespect, but you are misguiding the OP with baseless nonsense. If I understand you right, your point is, the more you do to correct for ones room's imperfections, the worse sound you are going to get. by extension of that theorem, no room should be treated in any way, physically or electronically.

Look, I'm usually a really nice, helpful guy on Reddit. I rarely will call someone out. But your uneducated statements are wrong, on many levels. They are baseless, incorrect, misguiding and it's not a very nice thing to do to the OP and others who might think what you are posting is fact. At least the first poster started his post with, "this is simply my observation.....".

Now I'll give you that the brain can 'learn' headphones or speakers, and even a room, (to a very small degree if at all). You can only to an extent on, all of them. The issue is, we are never finished learning them....ever. That's why we listen to our mixes on different transducers in the studio, headphones, the car, and as many different places, because we are never sure! We never ever fully learned a pair of speakers or even a room with room treatment!

Please read the following and get back to me:.

"Nonlinear-acoustics" this is a good primer, and a freebee

“Sound Reproduction: Loudspeakers and Rooms”,Floyd E. Toole, This is a Classic

“Acoustics and Psychoacoustics”, This is advanced

​

Mr-Mud

​

​

​

​

​

I wouldn't necessarily say there's less scam in high-end audio. It's more than with headphones, no matter how good they sound, there still seems to be a high degree of individual preference, and they're not as well studied.


With speakers, there are still high end companies of all sorts, but we at least have a rather solid idea of what sounds good. People assume audio is subjective, but it turns out people are much more likely to pick a speaker that measures better in a handful of respects (flat frequency response, smooth dispersion) regardless of their supposed preferences, experience, or training.


I think part of what makes finding information about speakers more difficult is that headphones are more of a young people thing and they are easier to try out. They rose to prominence with the internet. Speakers, meanwhile, have been around forever, with a myriad of brands that are difficult to compare. Another reason why understanding measurements are handy, as they let you predict the sound of a speaker to a certain extent.


If you really want to learn about speakers, I'd recommend you watch watch this 1 hour lecture by Dr Floyd Toole - one of the most important audio researchers - for a summary of current research. Audioholics has a good writeup too.


And if you want to get even more serious, you can read Dr Toole's book. It's an eye-opening compendium of much of the current research on speakers.


Learning to understand speaker measurements makes it a lot easier to pick a speaker, since I have an idea of what it will sound like before I listen. Granted, this does take some experience. But I actually work reviewing audio gear (and other stuff) for a living, and the more I test speakers, the more I realize the value of measurements.


I haven't actually heard the Revels. That's just what people - including researchers and audio enthusiasts I respect - say about them. That said, I didn't mean to imply I wasn't that impressed by the Focal's though. I loved them. Just there are a lot of great speakers out there.


Lastly, it's very hard to compare speakers to headphones for me. They're almost completely different experiences, each with their own benefits.


To me, headphones always sound more detailed, which is what I enjoy. I can pick out little things in the music I struggle to with speakers. But it's a lot easier to find speakers that sound "natural" than headphones, because the latter depend directly on your head/ear shape, while speakers don't. With speakers, generally speaking a speaker that measures flat and spreads sound out evenly throughout a room will sound natural. With headphones, what sounds neutral to me, might be 'bright' to one person and 'dark' to someone else.

Internet is a very complex global network of networks. Internet security is a bit vague term, what you really are looking for is network security, but even before you go for understanding security you first need to understand how network communication works. First understand the basics.

Network communication is made possible by hardware and software stack. Electrical/telecom engineers take care of the hardware part, i-e how the data has to be multiplexed into signals (see Frequency division multiplexing, Time Division Multiplexing) and transmitted over through some medium and de-multiplexed again at the receiver end.

Software stack is an implementation of set of protocols/standards through which communication between processes, devices and networks is made possible, the famous one is TCP/IP stack. There is another conceptual networking model OSI model as well but TCP/IP is the most well known and widely implemented protocol stack. Make yourself familiar with the TCP/IP stack, you should grasp basics like how different layers of stack communicate with each other and how different protocols work together to make the magic of internet possible.

You should learn the HTTP request/response flow and then relate it to what you have learned so far.

When you are done with these, move towards more advance stuff. Network security involves understanding about cryptographic algorithms that includes symmetric (eg AES) and public key cryptography (RSA) and hashing algorithms (SHA, MD5 etc). Get an overview about these systems, how and why they are used. These cryptographic algorithms/concepts Cryptography is based on mathematics especially number theory but you don't need to worry about that at the moment. Abstract understanding is important before you get into more details.

Learn about how SSL works. Exploits work at almost all levels of protocol stack, starting from exploits in HTTP and TCP to lower level packet sniffing and Man in the middle attacks. Learn a front end web language i-e javascript and at least know about one server side scripting language, PHP is one of the easiest to learn.

I recommend Computer Networking: A top down Approach by Kurose, this book explains the complex concepts in a very intuitive language and is used as a text for undergraduate networks course throughout the world.

Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach

Cryptography and Network Security: Principles and Practice

There is another very good book TCP/IP Protocol Suite by Behroz Forouzan but the text is very dense and detailed, and usually is taught at advanced undergraduate or graduate level networking courses.

Read good and famous security blogs and Keep learning with a lot of patience. Cheers!

This audioholics post seems more a summary on Floyd Toole's book on sound reproduction and listener preference. If you like this kind of material, I highly recommend Toole's book.

​

I don't mean to hijack this post but John Atkinson also has a three part series on Stereophile that might be a complimentary work. It's written from the perspective of a reviewer.

​

Here's John Atkinson's series:

• Part 1: voltage sensitivity, efficiency, impedance
  
• Part 2: impulse response, step response, cabinet resonance
  
• Part 3: measurement microphones, room effects, direct response, polar response
  
  The articles are not overly verbose and worth the read. Here are some snippets that I found interesting:
  
  >The advantage of specifying sensitivity rather than efficiency is that it remains unchanged no matter what the impedance of the loudspeaker, as it is assumed that the amplifier will always be able to provide the necessary current to maintain the 2.83V.
  
  ...
  
  >One interesting national difference emerged: moving-coil speakers designed by British engineers tended to have their minimum impedance in the high treble, around 10kHz, while those from US engineers tended to have it in the low midrange.
  
  ...
  
  >In private communications back in 1991, both Fred Davis and Don Keele pointed out that Stereophile's loudspeaker impedance phase curves published between late 1990 and early 1991 were upside down, in that the positive and negative phase angles were reversed [22].
  
  ...
  
  >It appears that the designer of the speaker featured in these four graphs has chosen to use high-order crossover filters of some kind, which necessarily introduce significant (180 degrees or greater) phase shift in the crossover region. To this must be added the phase shift due to the time delay between the units, and the additional 180 degrees phase shift due to the inversion of the midrange's electrical polarity. The result is an on-axis amplitude response in which the drive-units add in-phase to give (we hope) a flat response. The tradeoff is that the system's time coherence is sacrificed.
  
  ...
  
  >Many audiophiles talk about a loudspeaker having a "fast woofer." Fig.15 reveals that there can be no such thing. A woofer's risetime is dominated by the crossover low-pass filter, which discards the high-frequency information associated with a quick move away from the time axis. A "fast woofer" is therefore an oxymoron. However, I believe that when people talk about "fast woofers," what they're really referring to is after-the-event behavior associated with the Q or "Quality Factor" of the speaker system's low-frequency tuning. Does the woofer stop quickly after the exciting signal has passed? Or does it keep moving, adding low-frequency ringing—"boom"—to the speaker's sound?
  
  ...
  
  >The advocates of accurate waveform reproduction, implying both accurate amplitude and phase responses, are in a particularly awkward situation. In spite of the considerable engineering appeal of this concept, practical tests have yielded little evidence of listener sensitivity to this factor...the limited results lend support for the popular view that the effects of phase are clearly subordinate to amplitude response.
  
  ...
  
  >These tests also showed that the best means of coupling a speaker to its stand—"best" in the sense of maximally reducing the amplitudes of cabinet vibrations—was to use a "lossy" coupling material, such as Blu-Tack.
  
  ...
  
  >An alternate way of looking at the matter is that the microphone should be at least as far away as the largest dimension of the loudspeaker to be measured. With my standard microphone distance of 50", this assumption will no longer be true for large loudspeakers. With big speakers, such as the various kinds of panel speakers, there will be a proximity effect [55] that tilts up the response at low frequencies. This, of course, will also be true when the loudspeaker is listened to at the same distance.
  
  ...
  
  >Looking at the raw data used to compile Table 1, there appears to be no correspondence between flatness of on-axis response and price. But Table 1 does demonstrate that it appears that the chance of being recommended by this magazine increases the flatter a loudspeaker's on-axis response becomes.
  
  ...
  
  >Up to the middle of 1997, the vast majority of the 360 speakers I measured were reflex designs—300 models, or 83%—the designer using the port to extend the design's anechoic low-frequency performance. Yet in an actual listening room, the increased rate of low-frequency rolloff of a reflex design leads to less low-bass output than with an equivalent sealed-box design, with its 12dB/octave rollout.
  
  ...
  
  >Similarly, having measured many speakers with exotic LF alignments, ranging from the so-called "transmission line" to multiported, multidriver monstrosities, it is my considered opinion that in almost every case, the same or better bass performance could be achieved with an equivalent sealed-box alignment.
  
  ...
  
  >I believe that much of the fine-tuning performed by loudspeaker designers—commonly referred to as "voicing" a design—involves balancing the on-axis and off-axis responses to give an overall flat perceived in-room response.

My latest theory on reddit addiction is that it engages my creativity (composing comments ... I define creativity as taking what you know from your memory and utilizing it in a new situation) and curiosity more than anything else right now, along with random positive reinforcement (finding amazingly wonder links or comments that I never expected, but they do show up at random intervals, without fail). But in the end, it feels pretty empty. I got woken up by work at like 3AM and now it's 5:30AM, the sky is starting to get light and the birds are chirping, because I got on reddit. Since I struggle with getting enough sleep (I have a 1 year old who has started to wake up in the middle of the night, every night).

So, what I'm thinking is, I need to find something else that engages my creativity just as much but in a way that I will feel is useful or otherwise good, although it's hard to label stuff like that. I've been thinking of maybe trying my hand at creative writing, or game design, or something like that.

As for the random positive reinforcement, I'm not quite sure about that. In the article about about Reinforcement it says that variable ratio reinforcement is the most reinforcing, but now that I think about it, I think reddit might be more of a variable interval reinforcement, because hitting reload over and over won't make the good stories appear any faster, and reddit does get old after all the good stuff has been picked through, after, oh... 12 hours or so. haha

Finally, I think that reading all the crazy comments, and getting worked up about them... it takes a lot of mental energy, and so when it's time to do something different, we just don't want to because now that we're mentally drained, it's too much effort. This book which I just bought (for my ebook reader) might have something to say about that, but I'm not sure because I haven't read it yet: http://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393072223

Anyway, off to bed right now.

> But as we all know you can't really "quantify" or review speakers objectively.

Actually, you can. Researcher Floyd Toole is probably the best authority on this, and you should check out his research over the decades.

>In [1965], while preparing for sound localization experiments, Toole was surprised to discover that well-regarded speakers of the time did not measure well in the anechoic chamber—they were flawed in different ways. However he discovered that listeners in unbiased blind testing agreed on what sounded good and the loudspeakers that sounded best exhibited the best measurements. This led to progressive improvements in the anechoic descriptions of loudspeaker performance and to better methods of eliciting trustworthy opinions from listeners. There were, in effect, two parallel measurements: one technical and one subjective. The NRCC provided facilities for both, something not available to most designers and audio product reviewers.

>Toole published these findings in Canadian audio publications, through which he made contact with Canadian loudspeaker makers who began to rent the NRCC facilities for product development. Later some U.S. companies joined. The science-based process evolved and good sounding loudspeakers became more common. (Emphasis added).

If you're at all interested in the subject, I highly recommend you get his book. It will be one of the best investments you've ever made in audio as a hobby (or profession), and it could save you quite a bit of money if it keeps you from overpaying in certain areas.

You don't need a license to listen, but studying for the license forces you to learn some things that are useful to know, like which frequencies hams have privileges for, bandwidths, power limitations, and such. I doubt it would be a waste of your time. And as another person mentioned, tech is easy.

I have an A/E license but I have yet to touch a transmitter (I'm a listener right now). I learned a lot of stuff that was useless to me and my interests (e.g. I have no interest in packet modes), but I learned a lot of stuff that helped me understand what's going on.

Ham is huge in that there are a ton of different areas you can get into depending on what you're interested in. Some people are into the cutting edge technology. Some are interested in keeping the old tech alive.

If you're interested in building receivers from scratch--try the ARRL Handbooks from whatever era you're interested in (tubes, transistors, ICs). They're full of projects.

Also this: http://www.amazon.com/Build-Your-Transistor-Radios-High-Performance/dp/0071799702

If you have more specific interests, tell us and we can give you better advice.

Every practitioner has his/her favourite toolset but try not to limit yourself to any one tool (appreciate that your company isn't going to buy more than one platform at this stage for you). Learn EnCase by all means and go for your ENCE, practically all job adverts ask for either ENCE or ACE but aren't usually fussy about which. The reality is if you can evidence that you can use EnCase, FTK, or X-ways to a good professional level, if you are being interviewed by a practitioner they should understand that it wouldn't be a huge leap to learn another toolset. Ultimately, they all do a similar job in slightly different ways. My personal preference is for FTK, then X-ways, and lastly EnCase (too many wasted hours/days getting back to where I was when it crashed out on me back in the day).

Ultimately more important than any tool or cert is going to be proving that you have a proper, deep understanding of CF principles, filesystems and so forth, know your hardware and are confident pulling things apart to image them and all that good stuff. Get yourself a book or three such as https://www.amazon.co.uk/Incident-Response-Computer-Forensics-Third/dp/0071798684 and think about answers to questions that a good interviewer will ask you - tell me how you would evidence that this user did a certain thing, show me where you would look for this particular file and what its significance might be, explain to me when/how this data got deleted etc. If you become a practitioner, these are the sorts of questions that will get thrown at you on a daily basis, sometimes by opposing counsel, and you will want to have the answers in your back pocket.

Good luck with your study. This is an awesome industry to get into...

This only deals with receiving, not transmitting, but I've heard good things about the book Build Your Own Transistor Radios: A Hobbyist's Guide to High-Performance and Low-Powered Radio Circuits.

Here's the description from Amazon:

--------
A DIY guide to designing and building transistor radios

Create sophisticated transistor radios that are inexpensive yet highly efficient. Build Your Own Transistor Radios: A Hobbyist’s Guide to High-Performance and Low-Powered Radio Circuits offers complete projects with detailed schematics and insights on how the radios were designed. Learn how to choose components, construct the different types of radios, and troubleshoot your work. Digging deeper, this practical resource shows you how to engineer innovative devices by experimenting with and radically improving existing designs.

Build Your Own Transistor Radios covers:

• Calibration tools and test generators
• TRF, regenerative, and reflex radios
• Basic and advanced superheterodyne radios
• Coil-less and software-defined radios
• Transistor and differential-pair oscillators
• Filter and amplifier design techniques
• Sampling theory and sampling mixers
• In-phase, quadrature, and AM broadcast signals
• Resonant, detector, and AVC circuits
• Image rejection and noise analysis methods

This is the perfect guide for electronics hobbyists and students who want to delve deeper into the topic of radio.

I strongly recommended The Well Grounded Rubyist

This gives you a great foundation, it's extremely well written and a nice reference to go back to.

I also recommend Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby

This book is just amazing. If you're new to object oriented programming, and even if you have a bit of experience, this is going to improve your skills dramatically.

Good luck!

The Rails 4 Way is excellent. It really covers everything, filling in gaps that you may have in your knowledge.


I would suggest reading this once you have a bit of rails knowledge. I've read the book over twice, and it was responsible for a surge in my rails knowledge/abilities.


I would actually suggest you make sure your understanding of Ruby is absolutely solid before you read the Rails 4 Way. It's not necessary, but I think the best way to learn Rails is to first have a full understanding of Ruby. That way, you truly understand what's going on under the hood when you're learning about various Rails features.


For Ruby, I recommend The Well-Grounded Rubyist. This is a great book, and it doesn't require you to code along with it (thought it does allow you to if you want, and it comes with sample code you can download).

Okay, so I know it's been over three weeks since you asked, but I'm going to go ahead and answer, anyway.

I graduated with a BA in Professional and Technical Writing in May 2010. I didn't get my first job until January of this year and that required me to move across the country. There are a lot more technical writing jobs in metropolitan areas.

I don't know if you've got another career and are looking to try something different, or if you're trying to decide what to do after college. Either way, employers want experience. I was actually really lucky to get my job with no experience. They tried two other people who didn't work out so they gave me a call.

Overall, I love my job. I learn something new every day. I'm working for a software development company and I knew nothing about software development before I started here.

The work can get a little tedious at times. Also, this definitely isn't creative writing. I work on a lot of proposals for government contracts and 90% of the content is copied and pasted from previous proposals, then tweaked to meet the requirements of the new proposal.

All of WitchDr's advice is good. I'd also recommend working on your portfolio. Create a website. Write a manual for software or a product that you use.

I also think you should learn HTML. This book is awesome.

how deep in the weeds do you want to get into OSPF? do you want to understand enough just to be able to troubleshoot and bring up a new router, or [re]design the entire network?
John Moy's book should still be the standard; he wrote the RFC.

If you want to actually design a network, I still love Russ White's Cisco Press book on Optimal Routing Design.

If you just want an overview, the Cisco OSPF design guide can give you the nomenclature. Though the examples are IOS, the principles carry over.

Along with /u/totallygeek recommendations, if you're going to deploy OSPF onto a network, I would add:

• Figure out what you're trying to gain from using OSPF that you currently don't have in your current network. Redundancy? Faster convergence? Building out a WAN?
  
• Layout the IP addressing FIRST. You're designing an IP network... worry first about the IP addressing before speeds and feeds.
  
• OSPF, IM(strong)O, should be used modularly. Hand in hand with your IP addressing, you really should take advantage of building different areas. Don't go overboard and create multiple areas just for the heck of it, but don't get lazy and put everything into area 0 either.
  
• Decide how you will split up your network. Will it be based along functional business units (i.e., financing, warehouse, engineering), location based (floors, buildings, cities, geographic regions) or in some other way.
  
• Be stringent with what you advertise inter-area, either using access-lists/routing filters as suggested, or better yet, with the more flexible route-maps.
  
  Personally, I would stay away from virtual links as your abstracting what should be physical links onto harder-to-troubleshoot virtual links. I would also keep the area IDs the same as the top level network. For instance, if I was using 172.16.0.0/16 as the supernet for a building, the OSPF area ID would also be 172.16.0.0/16, but that's just me. There is more than 1 way to build a good network and as long as you are consistent on a logical design, that's what matters.

I recommend the book Head First Android. It is the best introduction to Android I've seen yet. This edition is three years old by now but it has pretty mich everything to help you delelop your first app, and then you can get into the shinier and more difficult bits.

I also recommend the Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development, it is more like a cookbook/encyclopedia but its well worth the investment, pretty much anything you'll want to do, it has a chapter on that.

Finally finished "To Save Everything, Click Here"

Honestly, it was a good book, although his point was made pretty quickly and it was unnecessarily long and drawn out. In effect, the internet is just a conglomeration of previous activities that existed in society. Its "revolutionary" nature isn't; it's just a continuation of things that have come before. So these ideas that stem from the function of the internet (well, openness works on the internet, so let's have openness everywhere in life!) are absurd extensions of logic. The internet isn't special, therefore the openness of the internet isn't particularly special either, or any other characteristic of the internet. Rather, moral and philosophical deliberation with technology itself and between people are more useful and more important that trying to extend the internet as a means to a solution in every facet of life.

Give it a 3.5/5.

----------------------------------

Now reading "The ABC's of Political Economy" by Robin Hahnel

Now this is a worthwhile book! Personally, I wanted to be an economist, and I understand that there are problems that exist within the discipline, but now exactly what those problems are. The author starts from a perspective informed by feminism, political activists, sociology, biology, etc...but all brought to bear against mainstream economics. Honestly, it's rejuvenated my interest in economics. I'm about half way through and I've learned so much!

Would definitely recommend if you're into economics. 5/5.

Also, for reading, this and this are two books I've found helpful.

As for learning, become a generalist. I'm a developer by trade but I can turn PSDs into HTML/CSS very well, I'm pretty solid with JS, and have a decent-enough eye for design that I can get a prototype working without necessarily having to turn to a designer. I also can do a fair amount of sysadmin stuff. I'm most solid as a dev, but being functional in the other areas has had enormous benefit. I can't emphasize this enough.

(Disclosure: I played a minute role in technical editing Ted's book)

Take my advice with a grain of salt because I have a bone to pick with Code Academy. Their approach to programming is akin to teaching art via paint by numbers. Instead of helping students understand concepts, they focus on the minutiae of syntax. Typing code is the most trivial and insignificant part of programming.


They present information in twitter sized chunks to maximize commercial gain. One, it maximizes ad impressions per chapter. Two, the information is spoon fed so you learn to copy code instead of brainstorming solutions. The effort invested in clicking through a tutorial gives you the false impression that a great deal of material was taught.


This is not learning. Learning requires you to tackle concepts you don't understand and push at the boundaries of your ability. Copying encourages you to memorize jargon to sound knowledgeable. Teaching problem solving using programming is a better approach. To program you have to understand why we need variables, arrays, functions, classes.


I would recommend Learn Python the Hard Way by Zed Shaw. This is an excellent tutorial. Look into Head First JavaScript if you want to learn JavaScript.

You are welcome.

Note that "Mark's" scenario I described above was extremely commonplace before same-sex marriage was legal, especially in decades past. For estate tax planning purposes, it was common for a gay man or woman to "adopt" their partner as it was one of the few legal options to absolutely ensure a partner's inclusion their estate plan. I have estate planning experience with several cases like those. Perhaps your husband has a family member that would be willing to formally adopt you and that could sever your ties to your biological family forever.

Ensuring your privacy is also partially dependent on state law, as well. Nevada, for example, has some very robust privacy laws that allow for individual shareholders (owners) of companies to be completely anonymous. There are several good books out there that can help you direct your life and help you become more "invisible" even in this modern age where privacy has become rare and precious.

You can do much of this yourself. A good starting point is a book like this: https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Invisible-Protect-Children-ebook/dp/B0065QZVB6.

If you ignore the conspiracy-type books, there is plenty of information out there on how to make your personal information more private. It takes time and effort, but it is possible.

Good luck.

>>> Would you say that the majority of linux administrator jobs out there are partly plain help desk support?

No, not the majority. Help desk type support is in the "IT" or "Office sysadmin" category. You can avoid those kinds of jobs especially since they usually require windows administration skills/knowledge.

>>> Or is there something else, something more advanced where you wouldn't have to deal with ignorant users, fixing the same issues over and over again?

Most internet type companies with funding and a practical business model will have "IT sysadmins" who support office/user systems and another group (something like "operations") that handles design, infrastructure, and maintenance of backend multi-stage environments. It seems like the latter is what you're interested in.

>>> Are there any particular technical skills (related to linux) that I should focus on to make myself more appealing to the employer?

1. Be, or appear to be, eager to learn anything and everything.
   
2. Read this book: http://www.amazon.com/TCP-IP-Illustrated-Vol-Implementation/dp/020163354X
   
3. Build a linux server. Build several linux servers of different flavors. Build BSD and solaris servers. Build and try out any OS you can get your hands on. Check out firsthand what's awesome and what sucks about each.
   
4. Learn a scripting language. Bash/shell is the most universal, but people have their preferences. I think python and ruby are what's in demand these days.
   
5. Learn how to use the vi editor, even if it's at a very basic level.
   
6. Break shit and figure out how to get it working. Fixing things that you didn't break is the most impressive thing you can do at a job. And the faster you fix things, the more impressive it is.
   
7. If a potential employer asks you what you did during that year long gap in your resume don't say, "Not much. Well… I drank a lot."
   
   The most successful unix sysadmins I know are always learning new things. Most of them would also be classified as alcoholics, but that's a different question for later on in your career.

Yes, speakers on average have improved massively. See this graph from Dr. Toole's book, one of the most comprehensive sources about speaker preference and engineering available.

That said, there are still a lot of vendors out there building speakers to old standards without use of modern research. And there are certainly some older speakers that were outstanding and probably perform well by today's standards. But a ton of progress has been made, especially in directivity, eliminating resonances, and doing it all in reasonably sized packages. There's nothing from 30 years ago that has anything remotely like the performance:size of the Dutch and Dutch 8cs, for example.

I don't known what your experience was like in NYC, but each of the different startup regions do have their own flavor. Austin isn't like NYC, which isn't like Seattle or San Francisco. I wonder how many people in NYC that you knew went to Burning Man. In the Bay, it is fairly common. Flashy shows of wealth aren't really a thing in SF like they are in NYC either. Pissing matches between the two scenes are actually fairly common. See this and this.

This is something I drafted a while back, which was edited and put into some piece or another, but basically highlights my point:
>
> From its earliest precursors, the Internet has had its evangelists. And the Silicon Valley offered a unique crucible. Deliberate and unintentional interactions among military researchers, academics, and corporate scientists helped to form the technical features of the medium.

> Meanwhile, the region was the center of the countercultural movement in the 1960s, the failings of which, wrapped into a technological optimism for the power of the networked computer. Along side its topological and programmatic development, discussions of its social, cultural, political and economic potential formed the ethical undergirding. Internet policy, especially the network neutrality debate, is made in the shadows of ideals set in this early era. Prime among those ideals is a profound faith in the technology’s emancipatory potential to boost democratic participation, trigger a renaissance of moribund communities, and strengthen associational life.

Maybe this is too much for your project, but I would look at doing a rhetoric construction of the concept of Silicon Valley. I know there is enough online to do this well. And perhaps this is just my distaste from some of the work I had to grade in grad school, but I always found this work far more intriguing.

This also reminds me. You might be looking in the wrong place for this. I would suggest going into the discipline of rhetoric/communication. Check out this, this, this this, and this. You should also check out Evgeny Morozov.

There are a ton of different things you can do on the defensive side. The path here is a bit less defined because you can specialize in each of these areas with out ever really touching the other ones. But I think these are the most important skills as a defender, so I’ll break it up into three smaller chunks. For the most part, defender/Blue-team concepts draw from these skills, I’ve setup the courses in order, as some of these skills may feed into other areas.


IR:

• Computer Forensics and IR - This is the hole grail of IR. Written by the best in the business, a great start to the world of IR and Forensics
  
  
• Network Analysis. SOC-based 1-day course (Includes slides and labs)
  
  
• Hacking Techniques and Intrusion Detection - 5-6 day course
  
  
• PCAP analysis and Network Hunting - 2 day course
  
  
• Blue Team Field Manual
  
  
  Forensics:
  
  
• Network Forensics - 2 day course
  
  
• File System Forensics
  
  
• Windows 8 Forensics
  
  
• Registry Forensics
  
  
• Memory Forensics
  
  
• 13 Cubed Youtube Series
  
  
• Advanced Network Forensics - SANS ( meaning If you can get someone else to pay for it, SANS courses are expensive)
  
  
• Overall Cheatsheet/Forensics knowledge dump
  
  
• Now, you’re ready for the CHFI Certification
  
  Reverse Engineering (Dynamic and Static):
  
  
• Practical Malware Analysis
  
  
• Malware Unicorn (Awesome RE, has an awesome blog and some good intro training)
  
  
• Malware Analyst’s cookbook
  
  
• IDA Pro Book
  
  
• Intro to Reverse Engineering - 2 day course
  
  
• Malware Dynamic Analysis - 3 day course
  
  
• SANS*** GREM Certification
  
  I know there’s not a lot of certs here, and unfortunately, that’s how it is across the blue team. Certs here are usually very vendor-specific, and not applicable to defense as a whole. Those certifications exist, but I’m not listing them here.
  
  If people are interested, I can also do a similar write-up on Mobile Forensics and Cloud Forensics (which is my direct background).
  
  Lastly, here are some of my favorite news sources across the InfoSec community -
  
  News Sources
  
  
• Ars Technica
  
  
• InfoSecurity Magazine
  
  
• Security Weekly
  
  
• Iron Geek
  
  
• Krebs on Security
  
  
• reddit.com/r/netsec
  
  
• reddit.com/r/netsecstudents
  
  
• reddit.com/r/asknetsec
  
  
• reddit.com/r/computerforensics

For iOS devices, you're going to want to start here, this will get you familiarized with the NeXtStep family of jive turkeys, followed up with a more formal introduction to Objective-C. I'll be honest, having some working knowledge of C will never hurt you, so after you're done with that, take a peek at K&R.

If you're aiming for Android, you have a bit of a different education outlook, I'd recommend brushing up with Head First Java. When I started poking around with Android, I read Hello, Android most of it should be still pretty relevant. I'm not entirely sure if it has been updated as of late, I outgrew it rather quickly, and if you do too; pretty much anything and everything by Mark Murphy is relevant. Best of luck!

Posted a link to this thread in programming. Not sure if that's against some etiquette, but there's no way to move a thread or such, is there?

I've just bought this book which I've been told is pretty good. Thanks for that link, looks like good stuff.

Email service Lavabit abruptly shut down citing government interference
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/08/lavabit-email-shut-down-edward-snowden

Snowden's email provider, Lavabit, shutters citing legal pressure
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2046261/snowdens-email-provider-lavabit-shutters-citing-legal-pressure.html

THE N.S.A. AND ITS TARGETS: LAVABIT SHUTS DOWN
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/08/the-nsa-and-its-targets-lavabit-shuts-down.html

JJ Luna writes:

"If the feds every go after you: No email you've ever sent will be secure. No previous cell phone numbers (in or out) will remain hidden. If you carry a smartphone, any remaining shred of privacy will disappear."

http://www.jjluna.com/myblog

http://jjluna.com/Questions

http://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Invisible-Protect-Children/dp/1250010454/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376021399&sr=8-1&keywords=how+to+be+invisible


"I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on--the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.

What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.

This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.

Sincerely,
Ladar Levison
Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC"

http://lavabit.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit


Encrypted email service used by Snowden mysteriously shuts down
http://rt.com/usa/lavabit-email-snowden-statement-247/

No domestic spying? How NSA collects Americans' cross-border emails
http://rt.com/usa/nsa-snowden-xkeyscore-overcollection-235/

Chinese media on Snowden: Washington 'ate the dirt' this time
http://rt.com/news/china-us-obama-media-233/

I'm not worried in the slightest. This book has everything you need to know to make yourself "invisible" and impossible to find if you want to be left alone by friends and family.

I'd pick up some acreage or a ranch and work towards having an amazing off grid, self sufficient lifestyle. I'd invest and make sure my children and eventual grandchildren were able to pursue their dreams and goals with no risk of ever being destitute.

I'd be content to just spend life relaxing, eating great food and creating art or music.

I highly recommend Hello, Android 3rd edition by the Pragmatic Programmers. It gives a good introduction with very few assumptions, lets you program something cool right away, and has the perfect pace. It's what I used to learn less than a year ago, and now I'm a mobile software dev at a great company.

Hi, I'm also an online business owner that wished to remain anonymous when I started about ten years ago. Throwaway account for hopefully obvious reasons. Like you, it's not nefarious. We sell a normal, high quality product... I just value personal privacy. A couple things have worked for me.

Method 1 was using a "Doing Business As", or DBA for short. This one's easy. Usually when you get a business license, you will have the opportunity to register any DBAs. This is usually used if your business name is, for example, Widget Holdings, LLC, but your store is called "Widgets R Us".

But you can also add whatever you want as a DBA. So you can add a personal name. This legally let me still use an assumed name while doing my business, sign contracts, add the name to a business bank account so checks to this name can be cashed, etc. without using or revealing your own name.

Method 2 is if you want a little more in-depth privacy. You can create a Limited Liability Company, or LLC, for a similar purpose. For example, you would register Sally Draper LLC in a state with lax information requirements like Wyoming, Nevada, Delaware etc. Since LLCs are often legally treated as a person, you may now use Sally Draper when opening bank accounts, owning or registering property, even signing a lease, etc. without ever revealing your name.

If you want to do this with nearly complete anonymity, you can find people in these states who will perform a unique service for you: You register the LLC, and are only required to list an agent and in-state address, which this person provides. Any official LLC mail will be directed to their address and forwarded to you, and these people will not reveal the name or information of the owner/principal(s) of these companies unless compelled by a search warrant. So if you aren't concerned about the law, this is golden. Usually costs a couple-to-a-few hundred a year. If you want more guidance, How To Be Invisible is an excellent resource for this and a great many more aspects of remaining private in situations like yours.


Just one word of caution from my own experience using an assumed name: First, my thing really took off and despite my caution, locals eventually found out about my business, including people who knew my real name. Out of the blue, a well-known local magazine reached out to do a write-up. Now, do I use my business name and confuse people who know me? Or use my real name and compromise my setup? I chose to stick with my DBA since it was professional, but either path leads to some confusion.

Also don't let customers do local pickups! Drop off or make 'em pay shipping. Locally, it's not that expensive.

Edit: a letter

My ultimate goal at the moment is to move into a digital nomad type role doing mobile development, preferably for Android.

So, my invisioned path from here is to buy or download some books on Android development and start learning. I've located what seems like a good source (of sources) for learning about Java/Android here, (taken from here)though I don't know because I haven't the links yet.

What is a good (and free) Java / Android Development courses online? Anyone have an opinion on Google's?

Does this path seem good? Should I be considering Java and Android Development the same thing? Thank you!

Generally I go here if I want a good overview and operational view.

TCP, UDP.

If I want to go for the long haul and depth....I start here (I used this list as it's nice and abbreviated of what does what in RFC land). Reading through those will give you a much better idea of how things were "supposed" to work. How they work with a vendor will always be up to interpretation, but the vendors are interpreting those RFCs.

There are quite a few books on Amazon that will teach it to you as well. I honestly would consider getting them too. This, this, this, this.

There's so many good books but those should give you that deep understanding.

Here's a nice explanation: http://madebydna.com/all/code/2011/06/24/eigenclasses-demystified.html

That said, if you're starting to notice the metaprogramming concepts in ruby I highly advise you to checkout Metaprogramming Ruby and here is a nice video on Ruby Internals it's a bit old, but provides a great view from the c & ruby aspects and is generally entertaining and intriguing.

Beginner: HTML/CSS

Intermediate and up: Read up as others have said, A list apart, Smashing.

Javascript: I read Head First jQuery and Head First JavaScript

Check out Head First HTML5 Programming: Building Web Apps with JavaScript as well.

You could also look into take an online class at Udacity (Free ones) .

I HIGHLY HIGHLY Recommend Pluralsight as I have been using it for learning ASP.NET MVC and Kendo UI but they have so many classes available with full exercise files and hold your hand from beginning to end. There is a 10 day free trial and it is $49/month.

Best Patterns:
The patterns are honestly not going to be that different, you just have more tools in the toolbox; and generally it is much easier and possible to keep everything very simple. The biggest mistake I see other Java folks make regarding Ruby is they make too big of a deal about solving particular problems, not realizing that while Java may need a 3rd party lib & 1000's of lines of code, Ruby can do it with maybe a 100 or so.
Bear in mind I have a different perspective from a lot of Rubyists on this topic, eg. I strongly disagree with the party line on Dependency Injection being useless/unneeded in Ruby land (most of the rationale I have seen for said statement displays a lack of understanding on what DI is and why it is useful). That is a bit of the Java side of me infecting the Ruby side.

Resources:
I can recommend 2 books in particular:

• The Ruby Way 1st edition of this book was what really got me into Ruby & what I could do with it when I started ~10 years ago. Note that it is written with the assumption you are already strongly familiar with the basic Ruby syntax
  
• Metaprogramming w/ Ruby this will take you on a whirlwind tour of Ruby's metaprogramming aspects, which are what really set the language apart from everything else, and specifically give it a leg-up over java in terms of programmer productivity.

A lot of people are giving great advice, but if you actually want to know how to do it, just search.

These 2 are pretty good, but keep in mind there is a lot of complexities involved

How to Disappear

How to be Invisible

Good lord, if I could solve that problem, I'd be a billionaire, don't you think? :)

Sadly, while I have a pretty good idea why it is happening from a functional neuroanatomical perspective, I'm afraid that doesn't do me a lot of good... here I am at work on a Sunday, trying to catch up on some reports I am way behind on, and yet instead, I am once again on reddit!

Ah, the inescapable pull of the dopamine reinforcement provided by reddit's perfectly bited-sized, just-enough-information-to-make-my-brain happy links (and the orangered envelop, of course).

And on a related note, have you checked out Nick Carr's The Shallows?

building scalable web applications

Great book that walks through flickr development process. Also if you google around facebook has some interesting reads about issues they've overcome. To me this is much better training then just diving in with a framework because you get the 10,000 foot view and can easily see which paths your web app will need to take.

In addition to the info here, if you plan to stick with ruby I would highly recommend reading Metaprogramming Ruby. It's a pretty easy and entertaining read and really digs into ruby's object model and things like blocks, and how they differ from more traditional OO languages.

The article is Mother Earth Mother Board, unfortunately the Wired online archive version linked here is missing the pictures. I highly recommend it though, definitely worth a read, and you can tell some of his ideas in Cryptonomicon (published 3 years later) were already in his head. Here's my favorite quote from that article, one I think of surprisingly often:

>Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades also occurred in the 1850s. Anyone who thinks that wild-ass high tech venture capitalism is a late-20th-century California phenomenon needs to read about the maniacs who built the first transatlantic cable projects (I recommend Arthur C. Clarke’s book How the World Was One). The only things that have changed since then are that the stakes have gotten smaller, the process more bureaucratized, and the personalities less interesting.

(I recommend A Thread Across the Ocean since IIRC there was not actually all that much in How The World Was One about the transatlantic cable.)

>Also tell how you hear a “resonance”

Lol. You need help bud. Best to just start here.I have the 2nd edition on PDF. Worth every penny.


Acoustic Resonances

This is a good free read:
http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/97_Things_Every_Programmer_Should_Know

Also this one is an excellent resource:
http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-applications/dp/0596102356/

Yes. Ronald Quan's (book on homemade radios) advocates the dirt cheap LM318 opamp, available from electronics surplus stores, hobbyist websites (example), and even legitimate electronics distributors like Arrow, Element 14, Mouser, and DigiKey. Its gain-bandwidth product is 15 MHz so the OP can use one to construct a preamp with a gain of +30dB (31.6x) for 0.125 MHz input signals. Need more than +30dB of gain? Cascade two of them!

The world of networking is huge. It's a marathon not a sprint. Huge repositories of information exist. Take your time to go through them.

Start with these -

https://www.amazon.com/TCP-Illustrated-Vol-Addison-Wesley-Professional/dp/0201633469

https://www.amazon.com/TCP-IP-Illustrated-Implementation-Vol/dp/020163354X

Use this to help supplement your studies -

https://www.amazon.com/Network-Warrior-Gary-Donahue/dp/1449387861/

As always Cisco has a ton of white papers -

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/security/intelligence/urpf.pdf

Free Presentations from Cisco Live -

https://www.ciscolive.com/online/connect/search.ww



If you wish to look at things from a different vendors perspective look into Juniper Day One -

http://www.juniper.net/us/en/training/jnbooks/day-one/

Finally RFCs are good place to get the nitty gritty of the protocols/standards -


OSPF

I can't recommend that book enough. It will give you a great overview over the services the kernel provides, design decisions and data structures.

In addition to that, these resources might also be of interest to you:

• Stevens, TCP/IP Illustrated Vol2. This is the actual 4.4BSD Lite tcp/ip stack source code; commented and explained. http://www.amazon.de/TCP-IP-Illustrated-II-Implementation/dp/020163354X/
  
• Kong, FreeBSD Device Drivers. Kernel module and device driver programming. http://www.amazon.de/FreeBSD-Device-Drivers-Jospeh-Kong/dp/1593272049/
  
• Kong, Designing BSD Rootkits. More kernel module programming :) http://www.amazon.de/Designing-BSD-Rootkits-Introduction-Hacking/dp/1593271425/
  
• https://github.com/teachbsd/course hands on course material, understanding OS internals via DTrace and FreeBSD

I would strongly recommend "Head First JavaScript":

http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-JavaScript-Michael-Morrison/dp/0596527748

I bought that book for a friend of mine who had no programming experience (but really really wanted to learn), and he loved it.

Build your own transistor radios gently sweeps from ultra simplistic to quite deep and technical, in a comfortable breezy style.

Designing audio power amplifiers starts from the viewpoint that circuit design is serious engineering (not random "circuit bending" or trial-and-error hobby experimentation or "Maker Faire" futzing around) and you actually must use algebra and other mathematical tools to succeed. It introduces the modern hybrid-pi model of bipolar transistor operation, which is what actual practicing analog design engineers use in industry. Other books on the same topic, by other authors, omit this crucial element because, as the pull-string-to-speak Barbie Doll says, "Math is HARD!".

There's a great little book that talks about this, called The Victorian Internet. It's a history of communication, and shows a lot of parallels between the advent of the phone to today's internet (and how people were afraid the phone would be the downfall of society). But it's full of interesting stories like this.

Yes, that is a good one. I would also not waste a ton of time on routing TCP/IP vol I & II but they are probably worth using as a reference as needed. I would add Moy's routing book to the list. It is as good as Halabi's and helped me out quite a bit on my first CCIE.

> because of ads. omfg. I am jacks complete lack of surprise. everytime secret money comes up its ads. which cash already does, as you point out. and anyone is free to pay in cash. go for it. noone cares.

Yes because privacy is important. Why is that hard to understand? Thats why the entire premise of cryptocurrency (the decentralized immutable public ledger) is a bad idea. It's not because of ads try reading my post or read the news once in a while like right now where cambridge analytica is again in the news. Or try reading a book once in a while like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Save-Everything-Click-Here-Technological/dp/1610393708/

> but thats not what butters are talking about. they are talking about international, anonymous movement of any sum of money. untraceable. thats what they want. can you give me a reason for that? and can you possibly maybe rack your brains for the downsides of that?

I never said that was good and I explicitly explained why their ideas are bad click the links. I can't give you a reason why what the butters want is good because I don't agree, if you had read my comment you would understand that.

Always love learning more about the history of the craft.

For anyone interested in the history of amateur radio, the ARRL published the book 200 Meters and Down regarding the formation of the League and the structuring of the amateur radio service prior to the formation of the FCC.

For a specific look at Marconi's contributions to radio in general, check out Signor Marconi's Magic Box.

For a history of the telegraph prior to the adoption/invention of wireless, check out The Victorian Internet.

For a history of the transatlantic cable, check out A Thread Across The Ocean.

If you want to go the book route, a good beginners' book is Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML. The other books in the series are also awesome if you need something slightly different.

I have Cryptography and Network Security: Principles and Practice 6th Edition. If you're interested in cryptography, it does a really good job of explaining the concepts.

Head-first Java is really easy to run through. Hello, Android is a good primer, though I kinda skimmed a lot of it. After that, maybe Java in a Nutshell and Android in Action to supplement the Cookbook?

This is the most comprehensive online guide I've found.
> http://billstclair.com/matrix/

Also good reads..
> How to Be Invisible by JJ Luna

> How to Disappear by Frank M. Ahearn

Care to elaborate on what you mean by functional program framework?

Are you talking about doing functional programming in C? I think there is a book on that. I think it's this one: http://www.amazon.com/Functional-C-International-Computer-Science/dp/0201419505/ - I'm not so sure though.

Are you talking about building framework/programs that are functional (as in robust, secure, ...)? If that is the case, then there is an interesting book named "C Interfaces and Implementations" going through several kinds of modules you might want to implement in C, and going through how you'd elaborate an interface and an implementation for them => http://www.amazon.com/Interfaces-Implementations-Techniques-Creating-Reusable/dp/0201498413/. This book covers the sort of thing that I believe you should be studying after learning the overall language syntax and semantics, how to combine features of C to solve not so trivial algorithmic problems, and so forth. In summary, it talks about modules design (both interfaces and implementations) in C.

There are more books here, like those listed in here http://www.iso-9899.info/wiki/Books. You can also check some more learning resources here http://www.iso-9899.info/wiki/Usenet and here http://www.iso-9899.info/wiki/Web_resources.

Still on my second interpretation of your functional program framework (because idk much about the first one besides that book "Functional C"), there are tons of very complicated systems built in C, like operating systems, server software, and so forth. And for many of them, there were books written. Here are some software for which you can find books on their design and implementation:

• FreeBSD => http://www.amazon.com/Design-Implementation-FreeBSD-Operating-System/dp/0321968972/
  
• LCC => http://www.amazon.com/Retargetable-Compiler-Design-Implementation/dp/0805316701/
  
• The C Standard Library => http://www.amazon.com/The-Standard-Library-P-J-Plauger/dp/0131315099/
  
• Minix => http://www.amazon.com/Operating-Systems-Design-Implementation-3rd-ebook/dp/B009TELWBE/
  
• TCP/IP => http://www.amazon.com/TCP-IP-Illustrated-Implementation-Vol/dp/020163354X/ (This is actually the 2nd volume of a 3 volume set.)
  
• Unix => http://www.amazon.com/Lions-Commentary-Unix-John/dp/1573980137/
  
  There are probably more, but those are the one which came to mind.

For me, these two books are essential:

• 99 Bottles of OOP by Sandi Metz and Katrina Owen
  
• Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz
  
  The two of them are based in Ruby.
  
  Also, I'd watch anything by Sandi Metz, starting with All the Little Things.
  
  That for OOP, but for grasping Ruby the best book I've followed so far is The Well-Grounded Rubyist by David A. Black.

Here is a book with excellent advice on how to make yourself disappear. I highly recommend that you purchase a copy of this, it gives all kinds of tips and suggestions on how to make yourself invisible.

Thank you so much for sharing your story with us, too!

Thanks for posting this. I've been so desensitised by the waves of TED-worthy solutionism way of thinking. Locally, the Yale-NUS kids are especially notorious for such ideas because THIS is the way they gain prestige among their circles. Doesn't matter if the ideas actually work, just need that notch on their CV and they're ready to ride it all the way to an upper management level in McKinsey.

Unfortunately, this will be the norm among the upper-middle and upper classes for a long time to come. Here are some books for those interested to learn more.

Winners Take All

To Solve Everything, Click Here

Geek Heresy

Not to say that people shouldn't strive for social change, etc. But real change requires real grind and understanding. The people doing so aren't usually in the media limelight either.

I'm just finishing up a book now called The Well-Grounded Rubyist. This is one of the best introductory language books I've read. I'd recommend it most for someone who has some familiarity with other OO languages. Moves fast.

A few classics:

Radia Perlman: Interconnections

Mike Padlipsky: The Elements of Networking Style

John Moy: OSPF: Anatomy of an Internet Routing Protocol

Interconnections in particular is a real classic that will help to give you a grasp on why things are the way they are now, and to recognize changes in our industry and how they relate to past iteratations (à la RFC 1925 Rule 11.

The OSPF book gives you insight into why certain design decisions and tradeoffs were made at the time (late 1980s) with regards to hardware and resource availability.

Mike's book is hilarious and scathing and reminds us that it is possible to overanalyze the technical details of protocol design and implementation.

Thanks a lot for responding, well I have been advised to refer this book Cryptography and Network Security: Principles and Practice. I will check out your book also.

The Victorian Internet (user review excerpt):

> The parallels between the Victorian Internet and the present computerised internet are remarkable. Information about current events became relatively instantaneous (relative, that is, to the usual weeks or months that it once took to receive such information). There were skeptics who were convinced that this new mode of communication was a passing phase that would never take on (and, in a strict sense, they were right, not of course realising that the demise of the telegraph system was not due to the reinvigoration of written correspondence but due to that new invention, the telephone). There were hackers, people who tried to disrupt communications, those who tried to get on-line free illegally, and, near the end of the high age of telegraphing, a noticeable slow-down in information due to information overload (how long is this page going to take to download?? isn't such a new feeling after all).

Read The Shallows:

"Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic―a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption―and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. "

https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393072223#productDescription_secondary_view_div_1482980996538

There are also semaphores which are the beginnings of telegraphy that eventually evolved into the internet. Here’s a book about our first telegram president, who was much better than our Twitter president. And here’s a book with the history of telegraphy comparing it to the modern internet. But it all started with flags as letters. Fun fact, semaphores are also a thing in programming. It’s flags all the way down.

This is your curriculum:

1 & 2 below are basically required reading in my CSIRT; 3 is optional, but advisable.

1. The Practice of Network Security Monitoring: Understanding Incident Detection and Response by Richard Bejtlich
   
   
2. Crafting the InfoSec Playbook: Security Monitoring and Incident Response Master Plan by Jeff Bollinger, Matthew Valites, and Brandon Enright
   
   
3. Incident Response & Computer Forensics, Third Edition by Jason Luttgens, Matthew Pepe, & Kevin Mandia will shore up any other gaps.
   
   Next get yourself and/or your organization to participate in FIRST

This book tells the story of the first undersea cable. It is a pretty good book.

Each of these three ventures actually included several attempts apiece. There's a pretty decent book called A Thread Across the Ocean that does a good job of contextualizing and explaining the project in a reasonably succinct manner.

I'm a software developer and it sounds like this is going to be a very simple app. I recommend doing it yourself, it will cost you much less than $400, you will learn to do apps and be able to make more and sell them and you will have complete control of your source code.

https://www.amazon.com/Head-First-Java-Kathy-Sierra/dp/0596009208

https://www.amazon.com/Head-First-Android-Development-Brain-Friendly/dp/1449362184

These two books and a month of studying and playing around later and you've got your app.


OOoor... check out fiverr.com

https://www.fiverr.com/categories/programming-tech/mobile-app-services

As a semi-new web designer myself, I can say I prefer and recommend Sitepoint for their web design books. But, beware, their books can be extremely marked up at some bookstores. Other good books I love to death are Head First Web Design and Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML.. even though the latter is a bit outdated.

These two are the most recommend for beginners

The Ruby Programming Language

Agile Web Development with Rails


More advanced topics:

Metaprogramming Ruby

The Rspec Book

Also, it's non-fiction, but maybe also

The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers by Tom Standage.

Nice work! Coming from python, when I started learning Ruby I was kind of miffed at the absence of something like this. However I found David Black's The Well-Grounded Rubyist to be a decent substitute.

http://www.amazon.com/Hello-Android-Introducing-Development-Programmers/dp/1934356565/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1319650728&sr=8-3

Is a wonderful read, very easy to follow along. And as the code was tested within the community before publishing, it's way more accurate than i'm used to in dev books. Sometimes hard to justify development books for something that is such a fast moving target, but this is definitely worth looking at.

Read this book front to back, if you don’t understand something ask on reddit/twitter. Use the second link to find training images and the tools to analysis them for active training. Bury your nose in this and you’ll land a job within 6 months, even at a firm like Mandiant (the book was coauthored by the founder).

https://www.amazon.com/Incident-Response-Computer-Forensics-Third/dp/0071798684

https://www.dfir.training/

A couple by William Stallings: Computer Security: Principles and Practice and Cryptography and Network Security: Principles and Practice

/u/LordBiff has the answer.

Discontiguous masks (that's the term for what you're asking about) are a thing. They used to actually work, just like the term mask (as opposed to length) implies. I tested this ages ago on a network with SunOS 4.1 servers and routers (running gated). It worked just like you'd expect.

John Moy discussed it in OSPF Anatomy of an Internet Routing Protocol

Subnet numbers usually were assigned to immediately follow the network prefix.
If there was a gap between the network prefix and the subnet number, the subnet
mask was termed discontiguous. An example of a discontiguous subnet mask is
using the fourth byte of a Class B network to indicate the subnet number,
resulting in a subnet mask of 255.255.0.255. The combination of VLSMs and
discontiguous subnet masks was a bad one, for two reasons. First, certain
assignments of discontiguous subnet masks could result in multiple subnets
matching the same number of bits, making the concept of best match ambiguous!
Second, common routing table lookup algorithms, such as Patricia (see
Section 2.1), could not handle discontiguous masks efficiently. With
discontiguous subnet masks already discouraged by RFC 922, the introduction of
VLSMs made them virtually unsupported. Discontiguous subnet masks are now
prohibited by the latest router-requirements RFC [12].

That last bit is a reference to RFC1812 10.2.2:

It is possible using arbitrary address masks to create situations
in which routing is ambiguous (i.e., two routes with different but
equally specific subnet masks match a particular destination
address). This is one of the strongest arguments for the use of
network prefixes, and the reason the use of discontiguous subnet
masks is not permitted.

There is a great book on the subject of the first transatlantic cable called A Thread Across the Ocean.

Yes and it promotes shallow thinking. Check out "The Shallows". It's about What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

I found the headfirst series refreshing for a technical book. Pretty limited but for newbs it will do the job

http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-HTML-CSS-XHTML/dp/059610197X

Something like that.

This book is excellent: http://www.amazon.com/Build-Your-Transistor-Radios-High-Performance/dp/0071799702/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1449635420&sr=8-3&keywords=building+radio

Not legal advice but you might find "How To Be Invisible" by J. J. Luna a helpful read https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0065QZVB6/

IS this a good book? ANd whats an OOP concept?

As a professional web dev, I HIGHLY recommend you start with this: http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-HTML-CSS-XHTML/dp/059610197X

You will learn WAY more from the $20 for the book, then the 1 hour of instruction that would buy you.

Check out Head First's Android Development. There should be some free pdfs floating around out there.

Also, to go more in depth, check out Fragmented's Activity Lifecycle episode (#76).

Ahem. Everyone is starting to have this problem. Read this. It's scary and enlightening.
http://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393072223

This is the article that made me read the book. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_nicholas_carr/all/1

Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby: An Agile Primer (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)

www.amazon.com/Practical-Object-Oriented-Design-Ruby-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321721330/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1398842637&sr=8-6&keywords=ruby#reader_0321721330

Eloquent Ruby

http://www.amazon.com/Eloquent-Ruby-Addison-Wesley-Professional-Series/dp/0321584104/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1398842637&sr=8-9&keywords=ruby

Metaprogramming Ruby: Program Like the Ruby Pros

http://www.amazon.com/Metaprogramming-Ruby-Program-Like-Pros/dp/1934356476/ref=pd_rhf_se_s_cp_6_BXWQ?ie=UTF8&refRID=02JTWKY2ZDHPVZWX181R

It is, there's sections dedicated to metrics in speaker design that have shaped how Harman designs their speakers, theory on room acoustics, etc. He has both a 3rd edition and a 1st/2nd (1st and 2nd are identical, 3rd is restructured and changed a bit while addding some).

Link to 3rd edition here [no referral]

You might want to read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. He writes about the internet as a new development in our history of mediums and how this affects, 'rewires' our brain. He also had problems with concentration while reading long articles or books and thinks that the internet not only improves our knowledge but is also changing the way we are processing our information. I'm currently reading it, so I can't give you the conclusions yet, but it's really interesting.

(edit - added link to book)

Some of the chapters from this and this might be useful to you

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr is a good book about this subject.

http://www.amazon.com/Hello-Android-Introducing-Development-Programmers/dp/1934356565/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1290108239&sr=8-3-fkmr0

I liked this one.

Thank you!

Amazon Here

There's an entire book about this.

Interesting read, too.

As others have mentioned, CCNA will get your started with the basics. After that it's going to depend on what your job's focus is. These are my top 3 recommended readings for anyone getting into networking.

• TCP/IP - TCP/IP Illustrated Vol 1.
  
• OSPF - OSPF: Anatomy of an Internet Routing Protocol
  
• BGP - Internet Routing Architectures

No question, W. Richard Stevens' books on the protocols and the implementation were the definitive works.

I haven't gone back to them recently to see how they've aged, but much of what I know about TCP/IP, I learned from those books. (I was tasked with switching over the internal communications on a large telecom system from a proprietary protocol to TCP/IP - again, I'm talking about the communications between boards in the system, not outside to switching centers and COs.)

Unfortunately, Vol. 3 pre-dated HTTPS (and SSL in general), too bad, I'm sure if he were still alive, Stevens would have done that topic justice.

I'd also recommend JJ Luna's book called Hiding from the Internet.

Start with this book and then try and think about privacy as a philosophy in the same way you need to think of security as a philosophy.

It is a life choice, not a bolt on accessory.

> It's the first time in human history that the ability to communicate with nearly anyone on Earth has existed

akshually

1. Really? Because you better check all applicable insurance agreements to see if they cover fire on that property when it's a commercial entity. He already posed photos of employees/friends working in this space. And the idea that no one has to follow any safety regulations if all they do is say "i'm self employed" is ridiculous.
   
   
2. That's patently false and shows a complete lack of understanding of acoustics. You're just making stuff up to placate the reddit crowd. Post false BS and get upvotes lol. Post science and get DVs. Welcome to reddit..:)
   
   https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Loudspeakers-Engineering/dp/113892136X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=floyd+toole&qid=1572283051&sr=8-1
   
   You can start there. There's decades, DECADES of science explaining the worst and best speaker qualities. And among the worst is a cabinet that adds any audible distortion to the input signal.

I'd recommend you read this, but you probably won't get past the first page

You can check this book : How to Be Invisible: Protect Your Home, Your Children, Your Assets, and Your Life. This book has full guides how to be anonymously for our physical and digital. There's one reviewer say that this book takes you too extremist about privacy in life, but I think you can choose the method of this book offer where you like to try or useless.

Taking a hard look at 'The Well Grounded Rubyist':

https://www.amazon.com/Well-Grounded-Rubyist-David-Black/dp/1617291692/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

No problem and thanks for the concern, I'm new to the forensic department mt past experience has been with areas not directly related to computers, the below is one such example of a field that contains almost no computer related content:
https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Invisible-Protect-Children/dp/1250010454

Yeah, I want to read those books when I get the chance.

https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Loudspeakers-Engineering/dp/113892136X/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1511848230&sr=1-6&keywords=audio+engineering

Try Head First Java or Hello Android.

I'm currently going through this:

http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-HTML-CSS-XHTML/dp/059610197X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320572247&sr=8-1

Going to do the Java one after. I'm hoping to get a web development position in OC/LA at some point in early 2012.

It's useless because it's a BA that isn't accounting. Any job you get with it isn't going to be because of your CLS degree (unless you get hired through your Field Study internship), it's going to be because of networking.

Yup. Take a look at Nicolas Carr's book, 'The Shallows'. It speaks to this exact problem, and what it is doing to a generation that can only digest bite size bits of information.

The one most recognized IMO is Hello, Android. It's got the most/best reviews and of the dozen Android books I have, it's the best-written.

This book is also given out in the class.

Source: Multiple Co-workers took the course recently.

I found Hello Android to be a decent introduction to Android development.

Easiest

Easy.

Another book, which looks particularly at the social impact of the electric telegraph, is "The Victorian Internet", by Tom Standage.

https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Nineteenth-line/dp/162040592X

It's a very dated recommendation, but uhh.. I'm old.

https://www.amazon.com/TCP-IP-Illustrated-Implementation-Vol/dp/020163354X/

​

Helped me lots, way back when.

Electronics: Build Your Own Transistor Radios: A Hobbyist's Guide to High-Performance and Low-Powered Radio Circuits https://www.amazon.com/dp/0071799702

I think the more pressing question is: What does this mean for 21st century brains?

http://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393072223

Burnette, Ed. "Exploring 2D Graphics." Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform. Raleigh, NC: Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2010. 61. Print.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Invisible-Protect-Children/dp/1250010454

I would also look at the vendor agnostic books on networking subjects. This book on OSPF and this one on BGP actually helped me understand things a lot. They might be older books but the protocols themselves haven't changed too much in that time.

http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-Android-Development-Griffiths/dp/1449362184

This

Learning Rails is harder without coding. I recommend Ruby books instead: Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby and The Well-Grounded Rubyist.

The ones I see most often are The Art of Scalability, Building Scalable Websites, and Scalable Internet Architectures, although I can't say anything personally about them. There's a question on SO that would be useful if it wasn't closed. And there's often good stuff on the High Scalability blog.

I'm not aware of any recent books, though, no. I've started a book about that and some other stuff, but along with not being finished it's probably targeting lower traffic than you're looking for.

i used this to learn basics after trying w3schools

http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-HTML-CSS-XHTML/dp/059610197X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321902275&sr=8-1

idk how o'reily is generally viewed on reddit, but as someone who had never really touched html, i thought this book was pretty good

this 1 star review is a bit apt:

>This is a book of CSS for those who can't concentrate on just one thing at a time. It's scattered, strangely organized, and filled to brimming with little notes, pictures, graphics, and comics. I hated the layout of this book and can only imagine it's for people who have to multitask, even when they're reading a book.

but hey, i learned.

1. Get centered along one wall so the room is as symmetrical as possible. Preferably with the long way to your back. Put your speakers close to the wall as possible to raise your front wall low end modal frequency as high as possible.
   
2. Build your own acoustic panels using a wool or recycled denim based insulation. The deeper the better.
   
3. Install those panels at your early reflection points on your walls and ceiling...and behind your speakers.
   
4. Get one subwoofer, preferably two.
   
5. Put isolation under your speakers.
   
6. Get some monitors that don’t suck.
   
7. Use an RTA with a transfer function to identify problem frequencies and locations.
   
8. Build your own helmholtz resonators to address low frequency problems.
   
9. Use more acoustic panels to address any high end frequency problems.
   
10. Diffusion on your back wall can make your room sound a lot bigger.
    
    Read a book. There are many, but Sound Reproduction by Floyd E. Toole is a must read for every audio “Engineer”.

>'It is probably down to the texting culture. The use of textonyms and so on. But it is also to do with the way young people read on screen. The digital age cuts back reading and, as a consequence, young people are losing the ability to think seriously. They get distracted more easily, breaking off to check an email. Speed-reading is exactly the wrong thing to do. You have to think about what you are reading.’ He gives me his sideways look. ‘You have to ponder.’

Basically the topic of Carr's new book The Shallows. Unfortunately I notice this behavior all the time now. Even reading this article once or twice my mind was wandering toward other tabs on my browser :P