The New Hacker's Dictionary - 3rd Edition (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This third edition of the tremendously popular Hacker's Dictionary adds 100 new entries and updates 200 entries. In case you aren't familiar with it, this is no snoozer dictionary of technical terms, although you'll certainly find accurate definitions for most techie jargon. It's the slang and secret language among computer jocks that offers the most fun. Don't know what the Infinite-Monkey Theorem is? Or the meaning of "rat dance?" It's all here. Most people don't sit down to read dictionaries for entertainment, but this is surely an exception.

Review

"A sprightly lexicon."
—William Safire, New York Times Magazine

"For anyone who likes to have slippery, elastic fun with language, this is a time for celebration. . . . The New Hacker's Dictionary . . . is not only a useful guidebook to very much un-official technical terms and street tech slang, but also a de facto ethnography of the early years of the hacker culture."
—Mondo 2000

"My current favorite is `wave a dead chicken.' New to you? You've waved a dead chicken when you've gone through motions to satisfy onlookers (suits?), even when you're sure it's all futile. Raymond's book exhilarates. . . . The New Hacker's Dictionary, though, is not for skimming. Allot, each day, a half hour, severely timed if you hope to get any work done."
—Hugh Kenner, Byte

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Product Details

• Paperback: 547 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; 3 edition (October 11, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262680920
• ISBN-13: 978-0262680929
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #780,115 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 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)

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.

8 of 9 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

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Definitely not a disappointment......, February 15, 2000

By	"sinister-cat" (Carlsbad, CA) - See all my reviews

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.