I loved Cryptonomicon. It's really fun as an affectionate parody of the tinfoil hatty corners of computer culture, if you've spent a lot of time around them. I can't imagine enjoying it without being part of the community it was parodying, and I've never gotten more than a hundred pages into anything else he wrote, but Cryptonomicon is still the only scifi novel I know not written by Charles Stross that involves computing without being cringeworthy. Not enough to make it "essential", but I'm glad it exists.
I just read the wikipedia page. I'd give it a shot on your recommendation, but it sounds like one of those cyberpunk things that really suffer from William Gibson's example, because William Gibson is awesome enough that he can get away with cowboys jacking in to their decks, and not everyone is William Gibson.
Before you devote 30 seconds to Daemon, know that it is the most cringe-worthy treatment of technology or plotting in the history of the English language. It is truly "make a gui in visual basic to track the killers" grade dreck. If Stephanie Meyer and Dan Brown set out to co-author a novelization of Threat Level Midnight, the results would be eerily similar to Daemon. But only if both Stephanie Meyer and Dan Brown were repressed tech support nerds.“This had all the earmarks of an SQL-injection attack, and he had a favorite one. In the logon and password boxes he entered: ‘or 1=1--”