Microserfs [Import] [Hardcover]

Douglas Coupland (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 371 pages
• Publisher: Regan Books/Harper Perennial; 1ST edition (1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0002253119
• ISBN-13: 978-0002253116
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (225 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,462,861 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars everything that is important about engineering culture, April 30, 2000

By 

Philip Greenspun (Cambridge, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Microserfs (Paperback)

After reading Tracy Kidder's acclaimed (by the New Yorker crowd) Soul of a New Machine, I thought to myself "here's a guy who spent 12 hours/day with engineers for an entire year and learned nothing about engineering, nothing about what matters to engineers, and nothing about the hearts and minds of engineers. After reading Microserfs, I thought "here's a guy who seems to have spent a week with engineers and effortlessly absorbed everything that is important about engineering culture, everything that matters about working at a big company, and everything that matters about working at a startup." Coupland's writing is better crafted here than in his earlier books, e.g., Generation X.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Imaginative and enjoyable, January 17, 2002

By 

Eduardo Zarate Gonzalez (Lima, Peru) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Microserfs (Paperback)

Being a spanish-speaking person and spanish-language reader, I don't have much opportunities to read American contemporary authors, unless they're writing computer systems technical books. So I must admit, my first glance at Microserfs was motivated by the curiosity of someone trying to describe how tech-obsessed, workaholic and project-slaved workers (as most people in my carreer) thought, felt and dreamed. I thought it would certainly be a challenge to build a plot with such characters. Copeland proved me wrong.

As I read this book, I got lest interested with the similarities to real geeks and more involved in the real metaphor of Microserfs: the search for personal realization in each of this genious but not so life-wise characters. This process, narrated with humor, tech & tv real-world metaphors, self-inspection and lots of deliciously imaginative - and fantastic- theories in the minds of each character, is what really drives the reader to love this book from beginning to end.

So I would recommend Microserfs twice: 1: to get a good understanding of geeks - which after reading this book will probably be no stranger to the reader than any average football fan, or any other obsessed kind, 2, to read a funny and imaginative novel while learning how this 21st century life is reshaping American's relationships and personal quests. The book's ending, fantastically crafted and at the same time full of new questions, is the best example of how this two ideas live together in Copeland's book.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Kindle Edition badly in need of editing/proofreading., July 8, 2011

By 

Trevor W. (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Microserfs: A Novel (P.S.) (Kindle Edition)

This would easily be a 4 star book for me and in paperback I'd give it that in a heartbeat but the Kindle edition is horrible. It seems like someone ran a hardcopy through a scanner and then OCR'ed it without proofreading it at all. There are letters missing, a few entire words missing and many, many instances of the wrong letter over and over (like a U instead of a V - there's an entire section where it says Silicon Ualley over and over) and places where the wrong word was picked up (ie - Interiority becomes Inferiority, somewhat appropriate in describing this edition).

I've read the book before and enjoyed it but the Kindle edition was a bit of a chore. It looks like the publisher didn't even proofread this book once before uploading it. A shame, really.