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.
Corporate use of MediaWiki Barrett, author of the book
MediaWiki (), has received media coverage for his deployment of
MediaWiki in corporate environments.
Gentle Giant 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, 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. 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, incorporated into several YouTube videos by other people, and independently performed by a choral ensemble at
ACM SIGCSE 2013. Computer scientist
Robert Sedgewick ends his algorithms course on
Coursera with this song. ==Bibliography==