Customer Reviews

The New Hacker's Dictionary

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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.

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.

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.

Perhaps we should start by telling what this dictionary isn't. First, it has nothing to do with breaking into computer systems and similar illegal activities which any layman would usually associate with hackers. It teaches you that hacking is not the correct name for breaking into computers, though. Second, it is not a dictionary of IT terminology. You can probably do your IT job quite well without knowing what a foobar is. And third, it is not a dictionary of the current cyber slang. The main reason for this is probably the fact that Eric Raymond is well beyond his teenage years.

Altogether, I don't even think The New Hacker's Dictionary fits the category of a reference work. Instead I'd dare to call it literature in the form of a dictionary, much like the classical Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, or The Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams. Sure, many entries can be used as reference, although a lot of them actually refer to historic software and hardware items like ITS, PDP-10 or LISP machines. The New Hacker's Dictionary not the dry, encyclopedic style of dictionary - entries are written in an opinionated, juicy style. The humorous side of the dictionary - a work of a witty, creative hacker mind picking names for things - certainly vastly outweighs its practical side.

So is this book for you? Yes, if the legendary MIT AI lab hacker scene fascinates you. Although LISP machines are gone, it's perhaps still affecting your computing environment more than you think. For example: Linux, the free Unix clone, is built on top of the GNU project, which descends directly from the MIT AI lab hacker scene. And finally, is there any point in buying a printed book, if the complete text is available on Raymond's web site so you can read it on-line? I'd say it is. You see, it's not particularly convenient to take your computer into the bath tub.

Anyone buying this book thinking they're getting a guide to current slang has missed the point. For that, they can subscribe to Wired. This book is valuable more for historic reasons than any others. I don't mean to belittle the worthwhile efforts made by the maintainers to incorporate current slang, but at any given time the "fresh" material is outweighed by 20-30 years' worth of semi-archival material. And that's as it should be. If anything, ESR tends to phase entries out too quickly. I'd rather see TNHD be the OED than the Entertainment Tonight of computer culture, know what I mean?

(No, I'm not some old fart longing for the glory days of the PDP-1 and TMRC. I'm just a CS student raised on Unix who feels we as a subculture have a heritage that's worth preserving. Maybe the Jargon File/TNHD can serve two purposes, but I think the historical one is more important.)

I would normally not consider buying something named "The New Hacker's Dictionary", as the first thing that comes to mind is "drivel for the stupid masses". However, I must say that I was wrong. The "dictionary" is actually by an author who is obviously familiar with the computing days of old - the definitions aren't idiotic new-age garbage, but rather words that most "hackers"/"computer nerds" will recognize - while the regular folk will not. The book doesn't discuss words like "click", "webpage" and any other "popular" computing terms - instead it's words like "foobar", "warez d00dz", "flipflop", etc...

If you're at all interested in classic computing culture, this book is something I feel every computer nerd should have (you fit the description if, among other things, you like monty python and your idea of the perfect evening is spending it at home programming, with occasional breaks to watch the X-Files).

If you're a soccermom, or a script/warez kiddie, this book is not for you. You probably won't understand it, and will certainly not appreciate it.

This is a one-of-a-kind piece of work, and the number of editions to date demonstrates the effort put into this Herculean task.

Somewhat thorough in its meanings and comprehensive in its listings, more esoteric terms could have been given longer descriptions, examples, or just better detailed explanations. This is reference material indeed, and one that will be useful if you need definitions on the lingo of the Hacker world, past and present.

This book has become a first level reference for me! It is hilarious, insightful and clever. I have a copy of each edition, and I will keep buying them as long as they are forthcoming.

I originally bought this book in its first edition, and only stopped reading it when I looked up and saw it was 3:00 AM. (I'd gotten to the T's, I think.)

This book, and the jargon file from whence it originated, is a slice of software history and sociology. If you don't have a background in software development, or Unix/VAX experience, much of the book will be uninteresting. And I think it's definitely a Bad Thing to evaluate this book as a dictionary - That's not a bug, it's a feature!

But if you did live through those thrilling days of yesteryear...or have slogged through the Dragon book in a compiler course as a computer science major...or are a serious software developer...this book is NP-complete with Good Things.

I am disappointed to see the removal of some older terms like IBM discount, branch to Fishkill, and Great Gray Wall, but I guess that's the price of what passes for progress. At least the online versions have a change log, so one can look up older entries, and the should-be-immortal scratch monkey is still present.

For the right people...I highly recommend this book. For others, it may just be a pleasant diversion, but buy it anyway.

"The New Hacker's Dictionary" is not an ordinary dictionary.Instead of a regular English dictionary, you get one that is the hacker's dream: a dictionary full of terms used by hackers all over the globe. Then you can really talk with your fellow geeks.

The dictionary is compiled by Eric S. Raymond, a well-known hacker, who is author of the popular book about open source, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". He knows the hacker culture well, and that makes him a good compiler. The third edition of the dictionary adds more than 100 new entries to the already rich list. Among my favourite entries are "larval stage", "scrozzle", and "wave a dead chicken".

Other than the dictionary itself, this book contains two essays, "Confessions of a Happy Hacker" by Guy Steele and "Hacker in a Strange Land" by Eric Raymond, as well as a not-so-short introduction to hacker speech, hacker jargon, and the hacker file in particular. There are three appendices. The first contains some funny stories about hacking in various situations. The second tries to portrait "J. Random Hacker", the most typical hacker. And the last is a short article of how one can help the hacker culture grow.

If you have interacted with other hackers (in Usenet, RL (Real Life), or in other hacker-populated places in the universe), you may have found yourself unable to understand some terms. With "The New Hacker's Dictionary" you can learn all these useful, strange, or simply funny words and thereby become a full-fledged hacker.