Hackers and Painters: Essays on the Art of Programming by Paul Graham Buy at: Amazon

An insightful collection of thoughts on what it means to be a hacker.

Let me get the bad stuff out of the way. First: the sample chapter is, IMHO, the worst chapter of the book. Don't let that put you off reading it. Second: the footnotes. This is a personal thing, but the book has what I consider to be a lot of footnotes which you need to look up at the back of the book. It's annoying and interrupts your enjoyment of the book. The content of the footnotes are worth reading, so why not put them in the text or at the bottom of the page? Third, and finally, there's some repetition across the chapters, which is a result of each of the chapters being an independent article.

There are also a few chapters I can live without (the first two, for example), but the rest cover interesting territory. For example, chapter 3 ("What you can't say") is a philosophy paper on beliefs and language, and how to identify things that are, in reality, ridiculous. It's good stuff to be thinking about, but unfortunately the author stops short of pointing a finger at particular thoughts.

Other chapters cover why web-based software rules, and how to create wealth via a start up, and how wealth works (in particular why income distribution isn't a bad thing). For me, these are the most appealing parts of the book.

The remaining chapters discuss programming languages (what makes a good one) and these fed the inner geek in me. However, I'm not switching back to Lisp anytime soon.

If you like reading things like Joel on Software, you'll like this book more. If you're not sure, there are some of the chapters available online.

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