Daniel J. Barrett

Daniel J. Barrett is a writer, software engineer, musician, and author of technology books.

Barrett has written a number of technical books on computer topics. The most well-known are Linux Pocket Guide^[1] and SSH, The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide.^[2][3] His books have been translated into Chinese, Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Barrett, author of the book MediaWiki (ISBN 978-0-596-51979-7),^[4] has received media coverage for his deployment of MediaWiki in corporate environments.^{[5][6][7][8][9][10]}

Barrett has been active in the resurgence of 1970s progressive rock band Gentle Giant from the 1990s onward. He created the official Gentle Giant Home Page in 1994,^[11] and though it began as a fan site, it was adopted by the band and is listed as the "Official Gentle Giant website" on the band's CD re-releases.^[12]

In 1996, Barrett compiled a 2-CD set of their songs for PolyGram entitled Edge of Twilight.^[13] Later, he also helped to coordinate the creation of the boxed sets Under Construction and Unburied Treasure.

In 1988, Barrett wrote and recorded the song "Find the Longest Path," a parody incorporating an NP-complete problem in computer science and the frustrations of graduate school. It has been played at mathematics conferences,^[14] incorporated into several YouTube videos by other people,^[15][16] and independently performed by a choral ensemble at ACM SIGCSE 2013.^[17] Computer scientist Robert Sedgewick ends his algorithms course on Coursera with this song.

• Barrett, Daniel J., Bandits on the Information Superhighway, 1996, ISBN 1-56592-156-9.
• Barrett, Daniel J., NetResearch: Finding Information Online, 1997, ISBN 1-56592-245-X.
• Barrett, Daniel J., Polylingual Systems: An Approach to Seamless Interoperability, Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst, February 1998.
• Barrett, Daniel J., and Silverman, Richard E., SSH, The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide, 2001, ISBN 0-596-00011-1.
• Barrett, Daniel J., Silverman, Richard E., Byrnes, Robert A., Linux Security Cookbook, 2003, ISBN 0-596-00391-9.
• Barrett, Daniel J., Linux Pocket Guide, 2004, ISBN 0-596-00628-4.
• Barrett, Daniel J., Silverman, Richard E., Byrnes, Robert A., SSH, The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition, 2005, ISBN 0-596-00895-3.
• Barrett, Daniel J., MediaWiki, October 2008, ISBN 978-0-596-51979-7.
• Barrett, Daniel J., Linux Pocket Guide, Second Edition, March 2012, ISBN 1-4493-1669-7.
• Barrett, Daniel J., Macintosh Terminal Pocket Guide, June 2012, ISBN 1-4493-2834-2.
• Barrett, Daniel J., Linux Pocket Guide, Third Edition, June 2016, ISBN 1-4919-2757-7.
• Barrett, Daniel J., Efficient Linux at the Command Line, March 2022, ISBN 978-1-098-11340-7.
• Barrett, Daniel J., Linux Pocket Guide, Fourth Edition, March 2024, ISBN 978-1-098-15796-8.
• Barrett, Daniel J., Responsible Software Engineering, in preparation. ISBN 978-1-098-14915-4.