The New Hacker's Dictionary [Import] [Paperback]

Eric S. Raymond (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 530 pages
• Publisher: MIT Press; 3Rev Ed edition (1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262680793
• ISBN-13: 978-0262680790
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,208,174 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating and very funny, May 17, 2000

By 

Mike Christie (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The New Hacker's Dictionary - 3rd Edition (Paperback)

If you can remember playing "Adventure" on a teletype, this book is for you. And if you're in college, hoping for a job in computing when you graduate, this book is for you too. It's an anarchic compendium of the anarchic vocabulary, habits, and style of the programming profession.

The New Hacker's Dictionary is mostly arranged as a set of alphabetical entries, but there are a couple of excellent appendices, on hacker folklore and on the hacker lifestyle and habits. (Hacker is used here in its original sense of someone who enjoys and is good at programming--Raymond has included both "hacker" and "cracker" as entries, of course.) The entry on folklore is simply hilarious; I wish I could just include Guy Steele's "more magic" story here, but I'll just have to tell you to buy the book.

The entries are a real mixture. Many, such as "indent style", go beyond just defining the term: this entry gives examples of the four major C styles and mentions the holy wars (another entry . . .) which have occurred over them. Some are quite current: Easter egg, kluge, Trojan horse; others are arcane or dated, but still interesting: NeWS, CP/M, chiclet keyboard. All the entries are interesting and well-written.

Newcomers to the field may find a good deal of enlightenment here, and old-timers will find a lot of memories. My own favourite entries relate to the old text-based game Adventure, which I encountered on a CDC machine in 1981. "I see no <X> here." "Plugh!" "Xyzzy!" *Sigh* It almost makes me miss those old teletypes.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Definitive Guide to Online Jargon, June 5, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Connecticut) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The New Hacker's Dictionary - 3rd Edition (Paperback)

The Jargon File, on which this book is based, has been the definitive guide to online jargon pretty much since there was an online to create jargon about. You may want another book to spell out acronyms and decipher industry-speak, but if you've been thrown in with a bunch of real geeks for the first time and can't understand what seems to be a language of its own, this book is better than Berlitz.

Even people for whom 'foobar' is not a foreign word will enjoy the essays and jokes in The New Hacker's Dictionary, and there's bound to be a phrase or two you can learn from the nerd subculture down the hall.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Definitely not a disappointment......, February 14, 2000

By 

"sinister-cat" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The New Hacker's Dictionary - 3rd Edition (Paperback)

Thsi book is a very good reference tool for any aspiring hacker and for the veteran as well. It does an excellent job breaking down the words and dialect making it easy to understand. It also functions for a good laugh when leafing through coming across words such as "Automagically", "Infinite Monkey Theorem", and so on.