Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

The modern world's hell on haiku writers: `Electrical generator' is, what, eight syllables? You couldn't even fit that onto the second line!

With Cryptonomicon, Stephenson has written a book in the style he's used several times in his other works Snow Crash, Zodiac and The Diamond Age, a style of detailed descriptions, well researched facts and at times a very different and often not very politically correct look at the world around us.

On the surface it purports to be about cryptography, but once you get started you realise that the crypto part is really only the glue keeping the stories together.
These are centered around such persons as Bobby Shaftoe, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and Randy Waterhouse, whom we follow each in their own timeline.

Bobby Shaftoe, a US Marine Ranger (in his words like a US Marine, only more so), as he's sent on one barely understood covert operation after another. Why would anyone in their right mind order a ship transporting weapons to ram Norway, and to explicitely not destroy the codebooks whose recovery will enable the Germans to break all codes for the entire Atlantic fleet?
Lawrence, a cryptanalysist working with the british at Bletchly Park, as he tries not only to break the German codes, but also to figure out ways of using the decoded information without alerting the Germans to the fact that their transmissions can be read. The Norway ramming will give the allies an excuse for changing their code without alerting the Germans to the fact that it was by reading the Enigma transmission they could know that the Germans have broken the allied code.
Randy, computer programmer, high-tech entrepreneur and grandson of Lawrence, as he tries to build a data haven, a repository for data with enough encryption to keep it safe from governments and competitors alike, to be placed in a country that to considerable irritation of several countries including the US can't and won't be pressured into giving up any information or demanding any backdoors to the encryption.

Apart from telling several interesting stories, Stephenson manages to give an entertaining view into the mindsets of mathematicians, computer programmers and marines as well as a good introduction to cryptography and cryptanalysis and the political and social problems involved both in the availability of strong encryption to individuals and in a government that does everything it can to prevent its use.

The main weakness of the book is its lack of a satisfactory ending which feels as if he suddently realised he had written 915 pages and had to get everything sorted out in 3 to avoid making the book too long.

The website for the book has a preview so you can draw your own conclusions, as well as the article In the Beginning... Was the Command Line which he later expanded into the book of the same name.