Rating: 
Summary: Great start
Review: For a first book this is very good. But having read the Da Vinci Code first, this book clearly deserves 1 or 2 stars less. While the plot is a page-turner, it is not very deep and could've been about 100 pages shorter. In the middle of the book the story slows down and adds too many non-key elements. I will still read Brown's other books hoping he only improved from this good start.
Rating:
Summary: A good weekend read when you want to kill time
Review: I have so far read 4 of Dan Brown's books (Angel & Demons, DaVinci Code, Deception Point & Digital Fortress) and three features of his writings stand out. First, audacious plotlines; Brown does not believe in small measures but goes out on a limb. The plotlines are way over the top but have just that crucial amount of credibility to draw in a reader, even when he knows it is fiction. Second, the pace is mercilessly quick; the entire plot of the book plays out over a few days at most. Last but for me the best of all, his books have a wealth of esoteric information that one would not normally read about. I found myself enthralled by a never ending series of factoids that had me rushing to the Internet for explanation or elaboration.
Digital Fortress follows the above lines. A quick capsule : Set with a cryptographic background, it describes a battle of wits between a governmental agency focused on breaking codes (used by good and bad guys alike in order to forestall terrorism) with a former employee who passionately believes in individual privacy. In a rapid-fire series of thrust and counter-thrust, the action cuts between Washington and Madrid with the standard does of blood, explosions and romance. Unlike Brown's other novels, this is very undemanding of a reader's intelligence - the average reader will see the signposts well before the protagonists themselves.
Sadly, there are flaws aplenty that seriously impact the plot credibility. Apart from the likelihood of an amateur professor being used as a proxy agent, the ease of the bypassing of the Gauntlet anti-virus software, particularly when Gauntlet safeguards not only TRANSLTR but also the databank is simply not possible. In such a situation there would be multiple layers of safeguards, not just a single bypass attributable to a single individual no matter how senior. More to the point, having raised the whole issue of individual privacy vis-à-vis governmental oversight, Brown never follows through on the implications. A pity, as this is of key topical importance as well.
Nevertheless, this is a good weekend read when you want to just enjoy a story and not get too caught up in the process. Three stars for that, with a star each subtracted for the plot credibility lapses and inadequate research.
Rating: 
Summary: Two things - two dimensional and too many holes!
Review: I picked this book up for some beach reading while on vacation. Unfortunately, for the author, I was just finishing "Whirlwind, the last book in Clavell's "Asia Series" (ie - "Shogun", "Tai Pan", "Noble House", "Gai Jin", "King Rat" and "Whirlwind"). I couldn't help but compare Clavell's incredible level of detail, research, character richness and the mastery of his plot twists with Mr. Brown's work. Clavell transports you to another place and time, Mr. Brown transports you to a below average comic book.The dialogue is absolutely predictable and flat. The story begins with an interesting premise - what if someone created an encryption algorithm that the most massive code breaking computer could not break? The story and characters are unworthy of the premise. Mr. Brown demonstrates an almost absolute ignorance of a procedurally oriented universe. Who would leave a $2 Billion dollar computer virtually unguarded? What security official in his right mind would send an amateur to retrieve the "pass key" to the ultimate encrypter - alone, without support? What amateur in his right mind would accept such an assignment? And, Mr. Brown, anti-viral experts are rarely the people that handle soldering equipment in the real world of IT, unless (like me) they are IT managers of small companies. In big operations, there's a huge gulf between hardware technicians and software technicians, and never do the twain meet. Don't waste your time on this book or money on this book - no doubt, with the success of "The Da Vinci Code", this book will be turned into a forgettable movie that you can rent sometime within the next two years...
Rating: 
Summary: The bad guy wasn't obvious to me?!?
Review: In the middle of the night David Becker's help is requested by his fiancé's boss, the Deputy Director of Operations of the NSA. Fly to Spain and recover a dead man's belongings. Right now, the Lear Jet is waiting, and it's a matter of National Security. Than David's fiancé, Susan Fletcher, a genius code breaker employed by the NSA, is called in to work for an emergency. There is a truly 'Unbreakable' code available on the internet - soon to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, and the only chance the security of the United States has is for Susan to identify the dead man's secret partner. While in the background, there is now an assassin following David, and Susan is unaware that what she knows is only the tip of an intricate life and death plot.
This was an excellent action/mystery that had me guessing multiple times about who was actually pulling the strings.
Rating: 
Summary: predictable but interesting
Review: I got this book after reading Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Both books are similar in the sense that the "clever" parts of the stories are in fact not very clever. Sometimes it's obvious what the answer to one of the puzzles are, or what the characters need to do, yet Brown goes on for pages describing the characters' train of thought. While Brown is good at describing his characters' thoughts to the readers, after awhile the reader will begin to wonder how NSA agents can be so stupid. Most of the technical parts of the book are correct, but if you are a technical person, you may object to the liberties Brown takes in the technology he uses.
On the other hand, Dan Brown knows how to capture a reader's attention. I like his novels for the knowledge that he incorporates into them. Though Brown doesn't teach as much about crypography in this book as he did other things in the Da Vinci Code, it is still an interesting read. I finished the book in two days.
Rating:
Summary: not his best stuff
Review: My least favorite of his books.
Rating:
Summary: A little disappointing
Review: Maybe I expected too much after just finishing the DaVinci Code. DaVinci was meticulously researched and Brown revealed the whole story like he was peeling layers of an onion. I read DaVinci in one sitting. I literally could not put it down. Digital Fortress was in the same vein as DaVinci. The formula is almost point for point a close of DaVinci. This is a complex mystery with believable and well developed characters. What bothered me was much of it did just did not make much sense. I don't wish to spoil the novel for anyone who has not read it yet so I won't go into any of the major plot elements or twists, but for example: If the NSA was supposedly stumped by an unbreakable cypher and the algorthm source code was available even if encrypted, then why would the NSA want to destroy the key and the code? If the algorthm really was unbreakable by their billion dollar beast I would have wanted to study every aspect of the code not destroy it without ever seeing it. How could they be sure there was not another copy or some other programmer would not redevelop one just like it in a year? Makes no sense, no one questioned this. Susan should have been all over it, but she insisted it be destroyed. The other bothersome things was Brown supposedly used the technical advice of retired NSA cryptographers to add techincal realism. However several plot elements made no technical sense. For example: If the Fortress code was posted encrypted using fortress itself, you would need more than just the passkey. You would need the Fortress program itself to decrypt it using the passkey. Just having the passkey only would not be enough. If the fortress program was available in a compiled format then the NSA could have easily (maybe not easily -but I am sure they could do it) decompiled the program to reveal the algorthm. Having the passkey would not be vital to understanding Fortress. The passkey alone would not have been enough to open up the encrypted files. Neither would a "brute force" attack on Fortress have ever been able to crack it. It would have to have analyzed and broken structurally. Brute force requires you to have the algorthm to begin with then you guess the passkey by using all the possible combinations. Without the Fortress program they would have had nothing with which to attack the encrypted file. If they had the Fortress program already they would have had to waste time brute forcing it. This is a Catch-22 scenario This is monumental technical error and destroyed much of my enjoyment of what is a very well written thriller. I will stop there as many of my other issues would be classified as "spoilers". Overall this was a good story but the technical errors are inexcusable in a novel written by an author of Dan Browns skill.
Rating:
Summary: Learn to write before you judge the writing of others
Review: It is interesting to see the "All or Nothing" reviews of virtually all of Dan Brown's work. But it seems that most of the "one star" reviewers somehow expected a science textbook rather than a novel. I'd guess they would go nuts reading DALE Brown and some of his "type" who write exiting stories with their own "created" science
By the way, as a retired professor with 22 yrs. of college and two PhD's, who has been reading scientific fact and fiction since the 1940s, the only thing I ask of the author is for the "science" to be CONSISTANT in how it is used.
LAST, I'D SAY THAT THE CRITIC WHO CAN'T SPELL URANIUM OR PLUTONIUM SHOULD GO BACK TO HIGH SCHOOL (WHERE NO ONE BUT THE TEACHER HAS ANY IDEA OF THE CONCEPTS OF NUCLEAR FISSION) AND TRY LOOKING FOR A STUDENT TO HELP. THEN FIGURE OUT HOW EINSTEIN CAUSED SO MANY BASEBALL BATS TO BREAK THESE DAYS.
Rating:
Summary: Page turner
Review: Authors of novels about computers seem to struggle with turning the abstract digital world into something tangible, and Dan Brown is no exception. Yes, anyone with a shred of knowledge about computers will cringe a few times over Brown's it's-an-advanced-computer-so-it-must-be-magic approach, but I really don't think including source code and core dumps would have improved the book. After all, it tells enough about cryptography to talk-the-talk; if you want to walk-the-walk you'd do better with a textbook on number theory. Of course it's inaccurate, but if you can get over that, you'll enjoy it. The novel's main protagonist, the NSA's head cryptographer Susan Fletcher, basically gets no characterization beyond a minor character's musing that it's "Hard to imagine [her legs] support a 170 IQ," but for the book's purposes we really don't need much other than that. Despite the supposed IQ, I almost always beat both her and her fiancee to the solutions to the various enigmas throughout the book, but there are definitely some unexpected twists towards the end. With an average chapter length of 2.86 pages, the pages fly by, and I read "just one more chapter" so many times that I ended up finishing the book in one sitting. Total hack writing, but it's good hack.
Rating:
Summary: Too Many Mistakes
Review: There are just too many mistakes in this book, that the author even made things up against historical facts. Computer technology stuff aside, I have to point out another major mistake the author made: In the novel, at the end, it took the scientists way too long time to figure out that the unlock key is the element mass difference between Urinum 235 and Urinum 238, because the author claimed that both atomic bomb dropped in Japan in 1945 were Urinium bombs. However, the fact is, only the bomb dropped in Hiroshima was Urinium Bomb (on August 6, 1945); The other bomb dropped on August 9, 1945 in Nagasaki, was instead a more advanced Plutunium bomb! Not Urinium bomb at all. This can be easily double checked or verified by simply asking a high school student! I think the book is rushed out to cash in on the author's fame on DVC book, and it indeed showed us how sloppy the process is.
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