books

Neal Stephenson. Bantam. Copyright © 1992. .

Stephenson's epic, comic cyberpunk novel is deeply knowing about the hacker psychology and its foibles in a way no other author of fiction has ever even approached. His imagination, his grasp of the relevant technical details, and his ability to communicate the excitement of hacking and its results are astonishing, delightful, and (so far) unsurpassed.

This book has been mentioned in the following pages of the Jargon File: Bibliography.

Hal Abelson, Jerry Sussman and Julie Sussman; MIT Press, 1984, 1996; .

This book has had a dramatic impact on computer science curricula over the past decade. This long-awaited revision contains changes throughout the text.

There are new implementations of most of the major programming systems in the book, including the interpreters and compilers, and the authors have incorporated many small changes that reflect their experience teaching the course at MIT since the first edition was published.

A new theme has been introduced that emphasizes the central role played by different approaches to dealing with time in computational models: objects with state, concurrent programming, functional programming and lazy evaluation, and nondeterministic programming. There are new example sections on higher-order procedures in graphics and on applications of stream processing in numerical programming, and many new exercises.

In addition, all the programs have been reworked to run in any Scheme implementation that adheres to the IEEE standard.

This book has been mentioned in the following pages of the Jargon File: Wizard Book.

Richard Phillips Feynman. W. W. Norton & Co, New York 1985, .

Proves once again that it is possible to laugh out loud and scratch your head at the same time -- New York Times. A series of anecdotes shouldn't by rights add up to an autobiography, but that's just one of the many pieces of received wisdom that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (1918-88) cheerfully ignores in his engagingly eccentric book, a bestseller ever since its initial publication in 1985 -- Amazon.com.

This book has been mentioned in the following pages of the Jargon File: cargo cult programming.

Stan Kelly-Bootle. MIT Press. Copyright © 1995. .

This pastiche of Ambrose Bierce's famous work is similar in format to the Jargon File (and quotes several entries from TNHD-2) but somewhat different in tone and intent. It is more satirical and less anthropological, and is largely a product of the author's literate and quirky imagination. For example, it defines computer science as “a study akin to numerology and astrology, but lacking the precision of the former and the success of the latter” and implementation as “The fruitless struggle by the talented and underpaid to fulfill promises made by the rich and ignorant”; flowchart becomes “to obfuscate a problem with esoteric cartoons”. Revised and expanded from The Devil's DP Dictionary, McGraw-Hill 1981, 0-07-034022-6; that work had some stylistic influence on TNHD-1.

This book has been mentioned in the following pages of the Jargon File: Bibliography.

Clifford Stoll. Doubleday. Copyright © 1989. .

Clifford Stoll's absorbing tale of how he tracked Markus Hess and the Chaos Club cracking ring nicely illustrates the difference between ‘hacker' and ‘cracker'. Stoll's portrait of himself, his lady Martha, and his friends at Berkeley and on the Internet paints a marvelously vivid picture of how hackers and the people around them like to live and how they think.

This book has been mentioned in the following pages of the Jargon File: Bibliography.