The Cuckoo's egg is a must read for anyone persuing a career in Devops or Security - It covers such a wide range of debugging techniques and ways to track down unusual behavior, that it's still a relevant read and great primer. The early anecdote about 'mirroring' the typing if his hacker by hooking up line printers to phone lines is particularly ingenious - using `tee` as a tool for the same effect has saved my hide many a time, and helped me understand complex systems. Introspecting median output is great tool (see also printf debugging).
On a different note, Cliff Stoll is himself a great dude, fun and witty and very friendly. I bought a Klein bottle[1] from him as a present for my father, who loves it, but the real treat was for me - I went in person, and he gladly took an hour of his time to show me his warehouse and custom robot he uses to manage it, and chatted about everything - Life, The Universe, his book and his business and software problems (I was at a videoconferencing startup, and he'd also done some work with telcos that proved relevant and illuminating). If you have a chance, buy a bottle and have a chat.
In the mid-1990s, I corresponded briefly with Cliff, and he seemed amicable enough; The one thing I recall from our emails is that he was adamant that he didn't persecute 'hackers', apparently pursuing a semantic split between 'hacker' and 'cracker'.
I talked a lot with Hans Hubner as well afterward when he worked at Art+COM, a good bit more than Cliff. I found Hans to be extremely generous, the sort of guy who was just flattered that you sought him out and would literally create an account on his Unix and VMS hosts if you just asked, despite the expensive metered rate he was paying for TCP/IP access at the time. He didn't talk much about the whole Cuckoo's Egg saga though.
Very nice people on both sides; Makes you wonder how much of it was circumstance.
On a different note, Cliff Stoll is himself a great dude, fun and witty and very friendly. I bought a Klein bottle[1] from him as a present for my father, who loves it, but the real treat was for me - I went in person, and he gladly took an hour of his time to show me his warehouse and custom robot he uses to manage it, and chatted about everything - Life, The Universe, his book and his business and software problems (I was at a videoconferencing startup, and he'd also done some work with telcos that proved relevant and illuminating). If you have a chance, buy a bottle and have a chat.
[1]http://www.kleinbottle.com/