A friend of mine and I both read it about the same time and discussed it afterwards. I thought it was pretty good, he thought it was not that great. What we agreed on was that in spite of there being many fantastic aspects to the book, on the whole it failed to be an awesome novel.

Definitely worth giving it a try if you're a programmer, just for the fact that it's written by another programmer: the opening scene where they find a bunch of rules written down and just follow them reminds me of ACPI; the discussion of public-key cryptography and shipping drives full of one-time-pad around the galaxy; the "compression scheme" with the video.