Steven's book has become a social phenomena in its own right. One moment, I am reading this book in the 80s and the next I am on a porch having a nice quiet conservation with Rick Greenblatt ("An honor to meet you"). Following that I'm on the Steering Committee for the Conference started by Stewart Brand. Stewart deserves a lot of credit, but Steven (whom I've met but don't know quite as well, since I am into high end computing not microcomputing but with some experience on Xerox workstations {life changing}). I shared an office with Jack Dennis the year prior while Jack was on sabbatical in California (we were both tea drinkers in a sea of coffee drinkers). I had not realized that he was into model trains. So I give copies of this book to East Coast friends trying to understand Santa Clara Valley. So I have lived a lot of the periphery of this book. The new edition has more chapter divisions from the first edition's three sections. Annually for the past 25+ years, several hundred geeks gather to continue the ideas in this book. The book has changed the world in subtle not well documented attempts: Cloud 9, Interval Research, Foo Camp, etc. The general non-computing public will never hear of these. Thousands of others in some know will lust for invitations to be "flies on the wall." Important things Steven got right missed by others: while the Apollo 17 story is all well and good, Steven picked up on the contrast between Northern and Southern California. Why did Lee's Homebrew Computer Club "succeed" while the Southern California Computer Society (SCCS) fail? This was an important lesson (I grew up in So Cal and attended the anniversary of the founding of Homebrew (HCC). More engineers up North and fewer better marketeers up North. It's a lesson from aerospace bureaucracy. Even Markoff's

I was recommended this book by a colleague. I love it too. It is about the initial stages of the computer revolution, yet reads more like a collection of entertaining short stories. It is far from a dry read. Included in the front are short descriptions about people and devices mentioned or interviewed. If you're a software developer this actually explains why IDEs mark errors with red. If you're a gamer, you'll learn about the first video game. (It wasn't Pong). I haven't red the entire thing yet, but it's still a good read. External links give you further details and some are entertaining. The book may be titled hackers, but there isn't anything illegal or even ill-intented. It was about the pursuit for knowledge and efficiency. This is a must for serious software engineers and computer science. If for nothing else then leisurely reading. There is a fair amount of discussion of assembly language, which is seldom covered in even college classes, usually one class for a single assignment or chapter. Not much is explained in detail so the education level to understand the book completely is fairly high. There are a bunch of inside jokes, but I do think that an average college student could understand 90-95% of the book.

Normally, O'Reilly publishing writes some pretty terrible coding books: not really explaining anything very well, not including entire examples needed to test out aspects of a programming language, and boring you with academic jibberish. However, this book (not a coding book, but stories of the earliest hackers) is great! It shows the electronic adventures of the earliest computer nerds (with their monstrous, slow machines) all the way up to more modern times. I especially enjoyed the humorous undertones of some of their more embarrassing qualities. There was even a computer game show that was aired in the 80's, but it was so boring so they took it off the air! The story of it in this book wasn't, and I personally really enjoyed Stephen Levy's writing style. You will really love this book if you are a programmer or a serious computer nerd, but if you aren't, you should probably read something else. Much of this book recounts the internal struggles of video game companies, and how there was a conflict between the open-information and playful culture of hacker communities and corporate culture. The latter unfortunately won out even though the hacker ethos still lives on today. One of the last sections of the book is an interview with Mark Zuckerburg and the reasoning behind his modus operandi. The only thing I don't like about this book is that Steven Levy is a little bit too optimistic about computing changing the world for the better, but this didn't detract from my ability to enjoy this book.