I think A Deepness In The Sky is actually better, especially for people on here. The story takes place on spaceships thousands of years in the future, but the characters are still using code based on Unix timestamps, and still complaining about legacy software.
100 percent. I read deepness before fire, and was terribly disappointed by the latter, even though it was a perfectly great book - just didn't measure up.
There is a deeper story. The realistic technical details are the bones; the flesh is the relationships between two human civilizations and a less-advanced alien race that doesn't know humans exist.
Very different plot, with a few connecting elements to the former, but still cracking good sci Fi.