Rating: 
Summary: Fun read, but letdown ending
Review: "The Bug" does a great job of getting inside the culture of a high pressure software company and the idiosyncratic personalities that exist in such a place. It also shows how the pressures of work can slowly eat away at a person's life to a calamitous point.What really disappointed me at the ending, though, was the revealing of the bug. The source code in the book has an even more glaring bug that the author and editor must have overlooked (look at the use of the width and height fields in the inregion routine). I would have thought that the author would have been more careful considering her background and the nature of the book.
Rating:
Summary: An assured, salutary debut
Review: Among other works, Ellen Ullman has previously written the non-fiction CLOSE TO THE MACHINE and "Programming the post-human: computer science redefines 'life.'" It was the gosh-wow aspects of these two works that convinced me to anticipate, seek, and read her first, vivid novel, THE BUG. (What an excellent metaphor! The 'bug' does more than double duty: there is the software bug, the bugs in Ethan's life, how Joanna bugs him, etc.) The surprise? That someone who has spent the majority of her adult life writing code - you know, 1s and 0s, Boolean logic gates, etc - could so artfully employ the writer's art of metaphor, simile, misdirection, style, and a winking eye (always anathema when programming computers)! Within the novel, Ullman shares computer-programming arcana that could be, should be fodder for inducing sleep... yet isn't. Where do these writers come from? How do they do it - i.e., make it appear so easy? And yet nothing adequately prepares the reader for THE BUG. Wow. Ellen Ullman breathes life into each character, especially core protagonists Ethan Levin and Roberta Walton. For example, as master-coder Ethan races to find and extinguish the bug in his software, he finally realizes that he must first de-code his life; unfortunately, he makes this 'vision quest' unaided and pays the price. And when things happen (to say more would be to divulge too much), all the birds come home to roost. Near novel's end, a dead-on comment made to Ethan from another character galvanizes him to action. His life will never be the same. Ullman has also excellently foreshadowed the novel's seemingly unexpected dénouement; her use of Conway's GAME OF LIFE as metaphor, as meaning, is both expert and masterful. The novel's theme resolves in a coruscating coda to the main story. If you are uncertain about reading this novel, try the pages that begin Part 2 (pp 87-95); there is no inherent betrayal of the novel's secrets. Moreover, they were particularly fun to read, and redolent of the late 1990s. What an assured, salutary debut. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: The Human Side of the Technology Equation
Review: Ellen Ullman has once again written a book intertwining the technical, emotional, personal and professional sides of computer programmers' lives. In this book, which is her first novel, a programmer at a startup in the 1980's chases a flakey bug. That bug ultimately proves to be a maddening obsession for him, taking a toll on his professional and personal life. On the plus side, this book was an easy read; Ullman is a fluid, entertaining writer, and can explain the technical details with a poet's perspective. She realistically describes the typical life of a programmer -- the meetings, swarms of elusive bugs, demanding schedules, the thrills of working on cutting-edge projects, the quirky humor of programmers, and so on. Interspersed with the action are philosophical musings about computer technology, "real" life, and the parallels between the two. Furthermore, as she did so well in "Close to the Machine," Ullman is able to describe the supremely logical world of software development and draw us into it to make us sense and understand the source of programmer's excitement and frustration. Like Ullman herself, the novel's narrator was not a computer programmer at first, but drifted into it. The result is a fresh, lively, fluid description of computer technology that a pure, "hard-core" techie probably couldn't capture. On the minus side, the novel had just a few drawbacks. First, the ultimate outcome for the main character was slightly disappointing for me (I won't reveal the conclusion here, though I will say I could think of a slightly better ending). Second, others have complained that the bug turned out to be too simple once it was found; however, I think that the complexity (or lack thereof) of the bug is besides the point of the novel, since its elusive nature is what drives the novel and characters forward. Third, Ullman tries to make the novel have two main characters -- Roberta, a software tester whose narration dominates the beginning and end of the novel, and Ethan, the programmer whose actions dominate the middle of the novel. The shifts between these two voices are mildly disorienting, and having a single character narrating the entire story would have been slightly better. Overall, though, I believe the plusses outweigh the minuses, and I'd recommend this novel to any budding computer programmer, or anyone interested in software or technology. If you enjoyed other books in this vein -- "The Soul of a New Machine" or "Microserfs" or Ullman's previous book, "Close to the Machine" -- then you'll enjoy this one. Despite the technical subject matter, this novel is ultimately more about the characters than it is about the technology, so I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested in the human side of the technology equation.
Rating:
Summary: The Human Side of the Technology Equation
Review: Ellen Ullman has once again written a book intertwining the technical, emotional, personal and professional sides of computer programmers' lives. In this book, which is her first novel, a programmer at a startup in the 1980's chases a flakey bug. That bug ultimately proves to be a maddening obsession for him, taking a toll on his professional and personal life. On the plus side, this book was an easy read; Ullman is a fluid, entertaining writer, and can explain the technical details with a poet's perspective. She realistically describes the typical life of a programmer -- the meetings, swarms of elusive bugs, demanding schedules, the thrills of working on cutting-edge projects, the quirky humor of programmers, and so on. Interspersed with the action are philosophical musings about computer technology, "real" life, and the parallels between the two. Furthermore, as she did so well in "Close to the Machine," Ullman is able to describe the supremely logical world of software development and draw us into it to make us sense and understand the source of programmer's excitement and frustration. Like Ullman herself, the novel's narrator was not a computer programmer at first, but drifted into it. The result is a fresh, lively, fluid description of computer technology that a pure, "hard-core" techie probably couldn't capture. On the minus side, the novel had just a few drawbacks. First, the ultimate outcome for the main character was slightly disappointing for me (I won't reveal the conclusion here, though I will say I could think of a slightly better ending). Second, others have complained that the bug turned out to be too simple once it was found; however, I think that the complexity (or lack thereof) of the bug is besides the point of the novel, since its elusive nature is what drives the novel and characters forward. Third, Ullman tries to make the novel have two main characters -- Roberta, a software tester whose narration dominates the beginning and end of the novel, and Ethan, the programmer whose actions dominate the middle of the novel. The shifts between these two voices are mildly disorienting, and having a single character narrating the entire story would have been slightly better. Overall, though, I believe the plusses outweigh the minuses, and I'd recommend this novel to any budding computer programmer, or anyone interested in software or technology. If you enjoyed other books in this vein -- "The Soul of a New Machine" or "Microserfs" or Ullman's previous book, "Close to the Machine" -- then you'll enjoy this one. Despite the technical subject matter, this novel is ultimately more about the characters than it is about the technology, so I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested in the human side of the technology equation.
Rating: 
Summary: simulated ecosystems shows intelligence, needs more life
Review: Ethan Levin's boss and fellow programmer tells him "Look..Programming starts out like its going to be architecture...theoretical and abstract and spatial and up-in-the-head...then it has this nasty tendency to turn into plumbing." Unfortunately, so does the plot of this book. You think you will get a brilliant and thought-out mystery and wind up with a plodding plot. Ethan's problem is that he needs to be a plumber and fix a bug that arose in one of his codes. But the bug proves so elusive and enduring, showing up at key moments such as sales demonstrations, in front of the VCs, etc and then disappearing again with no "core dump" of information that might help locate it, that it earns the name the Jester. Not just the Jester. Levin's Jester. The pursuit of this bug provides the structure of this novel - Levin's life devolves as his obsession with solving the problem grows, and the bug affects the company's future. Ellen Ullman comes close to writing a fine novel about the world of computer programmers in the early eighties. Coding becomes a reflection of and a contrast to human thought, a metaphor that is played out in a simulated ecosystem Ethan developed in graduate school that he turns to when "it seems my life has gone from one thing to another without my having much to say about it". Based on a theory called Life: the game, this simplified and controlled simulation is contrasted against Ethan's life that is both simple and complex, willed and spinning out of control, as he maintains his schedule and loses his girl friend. However, this metaphor is most successful in the beginning and end of the novel but seems to lose its literary power in the middle, become a mere plot device.
A bigger problem lies in the structure of the novel, which opens and ends with a first person narrator named Roberta who first discovered the bug when she was Ethan's tester and is looking back almost 20 years. Roberta also shows up in the mainly third person narrated main section, but mostly as a minor character, as she must have seemed to Ethan. But occasionally the first-person voice jumps back in, providing details of her life and loves back then, her own confrontations with the bug. These moments are so few that rather than creating an alternating and enriching viewpoint, they are jarring, and the character of Roberta in these passages seems beside the point of the action, which is what is happening to Ethan. The details of her love life have no reason to be there except perhaps to attempt to make her more authentic, but they slow the novel down. Her training as a linguistic does add some philosophical musings to the book as she contrasts the accretion of meaning to symbols with the world of artificial language. But this musing that establishes her voice occurs quite early in the book. By the end of the book, these references disappear, as does the voice and the Roberta we see could have been any other character.
Still, the biggest complaint with Roberta as narrator is that her jumping to the foreground now and then creates a distance the tale does not need and slows the action. Then, in the end, the voice of Roberta is used to tie up loose ends, but a tighter finer control of the plot could have done that as well.
Still, interesting books about computer programming are few and far between. The book begins as one of the better, and though it falls short of its promise, you will care enough to keep reading to the end.
Rating:
Summary: Wan and Bloodless
Review: First, let me state that I have a lot of respect for Ms. Ullman as an Essayist on computer technology and techie org behavior. Being a refugee from geekdom, THE BUG: A NOVEL accurately describes the technology and socio-dynamics of writing software in those bygone days. However, the novel is wan and bloodless. Ms. Ullman's prose is crisp and clean to read, but it fails to convey strong emotion. In particular, she misses the potential for the humor, ironic, puerile, or otherwise in the story. THE BUG: A NOVEL is a read that evokes in me a lot of nostalgia, but it is hardly, "gripping, exciting, and compelling".
Rating:
Summary: Good yarn, but a real let down
Review: Great story, but the ending really disappointed. The main character, Ethan Levin, spends nearly a year tracking down an elusive bug, and destroys his life along the way. At the end of the book, Ullman's narrator explains the precise details of the bug. This is unnecessary and completely anticlimactic. When one reads about how mundane the bug is (it's an off-by-one error for crying out loud!) the sense of waste is appalling. Ethan Levin has just spent a year watching his personal life disintegrate over THIS miserable excuse for a glitch!? Notwithstanding the anticlimactic coda, the story is well-written and touches on many bits of advice on how to live in this world. It comes down harshly on the obsessive type whose whole existence is his work. Some have compared the book to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in this respect, but I believe the moral of this story is a different one. Rather than the stay-out-of-God's-domain warning of Frankenstein, The Bug tells us that our mistakes are just that, our mistakes, and there is no glossing them over or blaming them on "the machine." They are still there to haunt us, but we created them, and if we try the right way for the right reasons, we can make things right again.
Rating: 
Summary: Written in Computer Geek
Review: I admit it: I'm as much a computer geek as the next person. Well, maybe a tad more. But this novel, written about how a computer bug affects the life of its originator, wore me down. It is boring, dull, uninteresting, and plodding. It was written in how I would imagine a typical computer geek would write: every small, insignificant detail described to the nth degree, and then some! This probably would have been more interesting if the author wrote the entire novel in C++.
Rating: 
Summary: a sharp, intense thriller
Review: I couldn't put this down. Ellen Ullman has to be at once the most brilliant and the most empathetic new writers I've encountered in years. The Bug is a tensely plotted psychological thriller, complete with action and suspense, but it's also a document of our recent cultural history -- how have computers and programming culture changed the way we think, interact, and make a living in the past 20 years? Thought-provoking with a conclusion you'll never see coming -- read this one. Now.
Rating:
Summary: great sense of the tech life
Review: I enjoyed this book for several reasons, not the least of them being that it does a good job of capturing the various flavors of a tech person's life for non-tech people -- and manages to do so without condescending to any audience. Quite a feat. But that alone wouldn't justify such a high rating; I also think she's done a wonderful, literary job of capturing the change that tech has wrought in our lives over the last 20 years or so. Highly recommended.
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