I enjoyed "da vinci code" and "angels and demons"; light story, interesting backstory. Really easy reads, based on religion and mythology, held my interest and entertained me.

Digital Fortress, exactly the opposite. It's based on computers and crypto, neither of which brown knows anything about. The story seems compelling in the beginning, especially since i read the other 2 books. It deteriorates rapidly though.

5 examples of head-exploding things this book teaches us:
--Complilers don't exist. Paraphrased, cause I'm not going to get the book to find the exact quotation: "Bugs exist because there are millions of lines in a program. If a programmer does so much as type a comma instead of a period, the program will exhibit erratic behavior."

--Typing lines of C code in a shell will change the program that's currently running. Furthermore, knowing the language is sufficient to accomplish this feat; understanding how the program works is unnecessary.

--A program hidden within another program, created to take control of a single one-of-a-kind computer, is a virus.

--The most sensitive computer the government owns, with stuff like nuclear secrets, has open FTP and X ports. These are only protected by a firewall. Bringing down that firewall is sufficient to expose every file on that computer to anyone on the internet. (guess one of the first things done was chmod -R 755 /)

--The smartest people in the world take 18 pages to realize that "the difference between uranium-238 and uranium-235" is 3.

I could go on. You get the idea. Blah.