content: I read this after reading Clifford Stoll's Cuckoo's Egg which is a much better book on the same subject matter. Stoll is just a smart and observant graduate student who simply tries to tell his story accurately. The 2 authors of Masters of Deception are apparently professional writers and they spend too much time trying to liven up what is essentially an account of high school and college kids playing on computers. You get the feeling they writing this with a screenplay in mind. The book is filled with cliches, bad metaphors, contrived rhetorical questions: "Destroy people's lives? Make them look like saints? Is this what hackers do?" There is very little interesting technical info and much of what there is is dumbed down and often wrong. The discussion of tymnet in chapter 13 is completely off. They obviously don't understand it. Cuckoo's Egg is much better and even the Littman books are better books on the same topic.