A car can be a daunting hacking target. Most cars don’t come with a keyboard and login prompt, but they do come with a possibly unfamiliar array of protocols, CPUs, connectors, and operating systems. This book will demystify the common components in cars and introduce you to readily available tools and information to help get you started. By the time you’ve finished reading the book, you’ll understand that a car is a collection of connected computers—there just happen to be wheels attached. Armed with appropriate tooling and information, you’ll have the confidence to get hacking.

Well. If you want a textbook to reference when you want to break into a car, this could be a good place to start. It’s not really a good high level overview, since it spends most of the book on specific examples. While those are fascinating, they feel too low level and specific to actually read through all of them.

Well. That was a sequel. Published 4 years after The Rook, we have a weird combination of following the events of the first book (Stiletto takes place perhaps a few months later as the Checquy and Grafters are coming together for peace meetings) but with two completely new main characters (a Pawn Felicity and a teenager Grafter Odette, descendant of one of the leaders).

Plotwise, it’s an interesting enough story, with two organizations that have been taught from early ages to hate one another for centuries having to come together and at least pretend to play nicely. Throw in a third (ish) party trying to throw a wrench into the situation? You have a pretty solid core for a plot.

Captain's Fury takes the ‘Alera at war’ feel of Cursor's Fury and really turns it up a notch. Tavi has done the impossible and fought a war against the Canim for two years now, holding them in place and building the trust of his followers to impressive levels. But now a new foe is coming for him–a foe far more terrifying than the Canim, or even than the Vord (who are much less interesting when you don’t see them on screen for a book or two)… politicians.

Characterwise, Tavi remains among the best part of these books:

The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications is a fairly solid introduction to computer security in the context of web sites/browsers with one fairly major downside: it was published 7 years ago. In the context of the Internet, that’s… quite a while.

Which this book was published, IE had a 40% market share, followed by Firefox with 30%, and Chrome with only 20%. Given that more recent numbers show Chrome with 70%, FF with 10%, and IE + Edge together only at 10%… the Internet has changed. Since it was published, Flash is the next best thing to dead. HSTS and CORS are everywhere now (mentioned as future technologies in the book). Some issues just … aren’t any more, while a whole new kettle of worms is about.

I can’t give you the white picket fence, and if I did, you’d set it on fire.

Oh Kate.

Were Furies of Calderon introduced us to the world and the Marat and Academ's Fury gave us a taste of the politics of Alera along with the threat of the Vord, it’s Cursor's Fury where we really shift to the military focus that defines the rest of the series.

A civil war in Alera plus an invasion by the Canim? Oy.

Norse and Hindu mythology (on top of what all we’ve had before)! Magical gladiator fights TO THE DEATH! Giant fight scenes! ACTUALLY LEARNING WHAT’S UP WITH KATE’S BACKSTORY!

That’s quite a book.

“The vampire stared at me, his mouth slack as Ghastek assessed his options. I took a couple of forms from my desk, put them into the vamp’s mouth, and pulled them up by their edges.

“What are you doing?” Ghastek asked.

“My hole puncher broke.”

“You have no respect for the undead.”

Today I found the need to look through all old versions of a file in S3 that had versioning turned on. You can do it through the AWS Console, but I prefer command line tools. You can do it with awscli, but the flags are long and I can never quite remember them. So let’s write up a quick script using boto3 (and as a bonus, try out click)!

Furies of Calderon felt like fairly standard high fantasy. It had a Roman theme rather than the more common (in what I’ve read) Medieval European and elemental spirits for a magical theme, but it still had a fairly standard ‘farmboy saves the day through strength of character and good triumphs over evil’ sort of theme. There were hints of a wider world, but for the most part, it was a fairly self contained book.

Academ's Fury takes all that and really starts to dig into the world building and expand the scope of the conflict. Where we only had the hints of ‘weird’ in the Wax Forest, now we have a fully developed and quite frankly terrifying threat in the Vord. While it’s not the most original concept (the Borg among many many others), it’s well done here. You really get a sense for how alien the Vord are and–worst–how smart. They learn and they won’t stop until everything is Vord. Also, the Canim. Warrior wolf people. Pretty cool.