Daniel J. Barrett is a writer, software engineer, and musician. He is best known for his

technology books Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in medicine, science, ...

Writing

Barrett has written a number of technical books on computer topics. The most well-known are ''Linux Pocket Guide'' and ''SSH, The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide''. His books have been translated into Chinese, Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. He is unrelated to Daniel J. Barrett, an author of mystery novels.

Corporate use of MediaWiki

Barrett, author of the book ''MediaWiki'' (), has received media coverage for his deployment of

MediaWiki MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWi ...

in corporate environments.

Gentle Giant

Barrett has been active in the resurgence of 1970s

progressive rock Progressive rock (shortened as prog rock or simply prog; sometimes conflated with art rock) is a broad genre of rock music that developed in the United Kingdom and United States through the mid- to late 1960s, peaking in the early 1970s. In ...

band

Gentle Giant Gentle Giant were a British progressive rock band active between 1970 and 1980. The band were known for the complexity and sophistication of their music and for the varied musical skills of their members. All of the band members were multi-inst ...

from the 1990s onward. He created the official Gentle Giant Home Page in 1994, 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. In 1996, Barrett compiled a 2-CD set of their songs for PolyGram entitled ''Edge of Twilight''. Later, he also helped to coordinate the creation of the boxed sets ''Under Construction'' and ''Unburied Treasure''.

Humor

In 1988, Barrett wrote and recorded the song "Find the Longest Path," a

parody A parody, also known as a spoof, a satire, a send-up, a take-off, a lampoon, a play on (something), or a caricature, is a creative work designed to imitate, comment on, and/or mock its subject by means of satiric or ironic imitation. Often its sub ...

incorporating an NP-complete problem in computer science and the frustrations of

graduate school Postgraduate or graduate education refers to academic or professional degrees, certificates, diplomas, or other qualifications pursued by post-secondary students who have earned an undergraduate ( bachelor's) degree. The organization and stru ...

. It has been played at mathematics conferences, incorporated into several YouTube videos by other people, and independently performed by a choral ensemble at ACM

SIGCSE SIGCSE is the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) on Computer Science Education (CSE), which provides a forum for educators to discuss issues related to the development, implementation, and/or evaluation of c ...

2013."The Longest Path" performance at SIGCSE on March 13, 2013
/ref> Computer scientist Robert Sedgewick ends his algorithms course on

Coursera Coursera Inc. () is a U.S.-based massive open online course provider founded in 2012 by Stanford University computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. Coursera works with universities and other organizations to offer online courses ...

with this song.

Bibliography

* Barrett, Daniel J., ''Bandits on the Information Superhighway'', 1996, . * Barrett, Daniel J., ''NetResearch: Finding Information Online'', 1997, . * 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, . * Barrett, Daniel J., Silverman, Richard E., Byrnes, Robert A., ''Linux Security Cookbook'', 2003, . * Barrett, Daniel J., ''Linux Pocket Guide'', 2004, . * Barrett, Daniel J., Silverman, Richard E., Byrnes, Robert A., ''SSH, The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition'', 2005, . * Barrett, Daniel J., ''MediaWiki'', October 2008, . * Barrett, Daniel J., ''Linux Pocket Guide, Second Edition'', March 2012, . * Barrett, Daniel J., ''Macintosh Terminal Pocket Guide'', June 2012, . * Barrett, Daniel J., ''Linux Pocket Guide, Third Edition'', June 2016, . * Barrett, Daniel J., ''Efficient Linux at the Command Line'', March 2022, . * Barrett, Daniel J., ''Linux Pocket Guide, Fourth Edition'', March 2024, . * Barrett, Daniel J., ''Responsible Software Engineering'', in preparation. .

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Barrett, Daniel J. American computer programmers American technology writers American humorists American rock musicians Amiga people Usenet people 1963 births Living people