Customer Reviews

Extra Life: Coming Of Age In Cyberspace

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

David Bennahum's "Extra Life" is one of the most touching, gripping, and interesting books I've read in a long time. The book is a personal account of the authors youth, his early descent into the world of drugs and alcohol, and how discovering the fascinating world of computers brought him out and changed his life forever. It was a powerful moment when the meaning of the book's title hit me.. like in video games, David was granted an "Extra Life", a chance to pull himself up by the bootstraps. Computers were the answer.

Perhaps I enjoyed this book so much because many of David's experiences hit very close to home -- while I was never did drugs or drank alcohol, and I am a bit younger than him (Pac Man instead of Pong), I found myself relating closely to Bennahum's memoirs. The similarities between us are scary, from our first computers (Atari 800), to our interviews with Microsoft later in life. "Extra Life" is the first book I've read that has hit the spirit of the computer programmer straight on the head. Finally, someone who shared the same passion for programming that I have! Bennahum expresses this passion eloquently.

"Extra Life" is a fascinating story, most likely the first of many personal experiences about growing up in the computer age we'll see in the future. After reading David's story, I had the strange urge to share my similar experiences. Personally, I can't wait to give this book to my parents to read, and I urge those parents who are curious -- and maybe a bit concerned -- about the hypnotic attachment their kids have with the computer to pick up a copy of "Extra Life" and read what that attachment is all about.

Cheers to David S. Bennahum on his first book. I can't wait for his next.

Although I did see a few parallels to my own youth in the book (I'm the same age, and also owned a Merlin and an Atari computer), I just couldn't relate to Bennahum's story.

Perhaps this is because I grew up middle class in a small midwestern city, while Bennahum grew up wealthy in NYC. I had to earn the money for my Atari 400 on my own, while Bennahum had his 800 and dual disk drive handed to him. My public high school taught BASIC programming on lowly TI99/4As, Bennahum's exclusive private high school had an extensive computer science curriculum and a PDP-11.

After this exceptional computer education in high school, he is admitted to Harvard and chooses to study history. (My guess is that computer science would have been too much unpleasant work for him.) I graduated from a small midwestern college with a degree in computer science.

At a Harvard job fair, he's fortunate enough to be selected by Microsoft for an interview. He's flown to Seattle and has interviews in several departments. He rejects them all as dull and accuses Microsoft of "fossilizing" software. My first programming job was modifying Turbo Pascal programs for a small software company. Hardly exciting, however I was thrilled to be earning good money for something I enjoyed doing.

In the end, Bennahum's book strikes me as the whining of a lazy rich kid who had every advantage in life but never wanted to do any real work. I was disappointed with this book and cannot recommend it.

I found this book 100% pure excellence. The way it weaved high technology with the realities of the times and growing up in the 70's and 80's. I have often thought that writing such a book would be terrific fun, but who would read it? I doubt I could ever write such an engrossing and entertaining book about myself the way David did with Extra Life. He succeeded in making an autobiography read more like a combination of a novel and reference manual.

Thanks for such a great book!

I throughly enjoyed this book, I am older than David but felt the same fascination the first time I used a Dragon 32K. I never mastered programming to the same degree but understand his enchantment. The book's underlying theme is understanding the interaction between the human and the computer not just the "human computer interface". The parallel between the PDP computer and the Internet should be compulsory reading for those (including my kids) who believe that the Internet just happened. I strongly recommend this book both for its literary merits and its insights into our recent history.

This book immediately brought me back to the day when my father brought home a Commodore 64 for our family. I was back in our basement hacking BASIC code all over again. Great read.

I find it annoying that someone gave this book 2 stars because he couldn't relate to the author. How is that is standard for whether a book is good or not? If that's how we judge books, then Star Wars and Lord of the Rings suck!

Anyways, this book is excellent. I was too young to notice the computer age in the 80s, but reading this book is as close as I'll ever get. It makes me appreciate where we were in technology and kindof wish that things were still as simple and straigtforward. But it also makes me marvel at where we're going as well. Thanks David.

This extraordinary book traces the author's coming of age through computer development. Examining his personal life through a digital lens, he illuminates my (and, I bet, your) murky history of interacting with everything from the Commodore 64 and my Atari game console to my present laptop. My mind reeled as I saw, and recognized, my personal history excavated by this perceptive writer. I heartily recommend the book to anyone wanting to better understand this most human of revolutions, the digital revolution.

This is the best book about growing up with computers that I have ever read. David mixes wonderful self-storyline with historical home computer accuracy and creates a book that reads more like an entertaining novel than a traditional book about himself. While I am year younger than David (I am 30 now-12/98), I can relate to almost everything he talks about in the book. How early home computers captured my interest where nothing else could. I can honesyly say this is the first book I have read, cover to cover, in many years. Most books about computers, be it reference or history, usually tire by page 100. This is not that book. I ordered the book from Amazon less than a week ago and read it in less than 3 days. I could not put it down. David has done an excellent job putting this diary and story down on paper. Do yourself a favor and read this book! It may shed more light than you think on Generation-X, the Atari generation.

Well, this book was like looking into a partial mirror of some of my friends lives, including mine. Growing up part computer geek - Timex Sinclair 1000 and C-64 were the basics - in a community of yuppie families with similar situations to Bennehum's put this book within a close striking distance to autobiographical for most of my adolescent friends and the entire genre of people that find themselves labelled Gen-Xers for that matter. Computers were a part of all of our lives from early on and Bennehum does a good job of using the digital metaphors to relay his societal message.

If you grew up with an Atari 2600, Intellivision, whatever, and find yourself now working with computers on a daily basis, then you should read this book. God forbid you did all that and now find yourself immersed in cyberspace as a profession...but if you did this will read like an autobyteography.

Written with a grace not usually found in a memoir, David Bennahum takes us into his first person account of life as one of the first computer kids. Raised during the burgeoning rise of home computers/game consoles and the extrance of time-share systems into schools, he shows the evolution of a hacker (someone who goes into the heart of the computer to explore and create). His account is a melding of Steven Levy's Hackers and J.C. Herz's Joystick Nation, and his work is a great addition to our understanding of the effect of home computers and the spirit of the Internet. Most of his story should be very familiar to his peers, but is written with elegance, no regrets, and no bravado. We see here the creative power of computers, the exploration of systems, the communicative power of networks, and the symbiosis of man and his tools.