Rating: 
Summary: boring book.
Review: The Bug. Kind of an odd title for a novel--what is novelist Ellen Ullman referring to? Is it the bug that has invaded a computer program designed by protagonist Ethan Levin in the mid-1980s, or is it also something less obvious, a deeper bug in Ethan's life. Ethan is pretty much all work, no play, and he has the disintegrating life--love life, friendships--to prove it. The program he has designed has a bug in it, a bug discovered by software tester Roberta Walton. Ethan spends much of the novel tracking the bug down, and helped, at times, by Roberta. The narrative moves forward on two paths--Roberta tells her side of the story from her 2000 vantage point, while an omniscient narrator fills us in on Ethan's disintegrating life. This is a well written story--the plot isn't all that clever or unique, but neither is it predictable. There is much in here of computer codes--but that shouldn't turn the computer neophyte off. I am sure much of that went over my head, but don't think that affected my enjoyment of the novel. The Bug is an entertaining, quick read.
Rating: 
Summary: This Bug is Good
Review: The Bug. Kind of an odd title for a novel--what is novelist Ellen Ullman referring to? Is it the bug that has invaded a computer program designed by protagonist Ethan Levin in the mid-1980s, or is it also something less obvious, a deeper bug in Ethan's life. Ethan is pretty much all work, no play, and he has the disintegrating life--love life, friendships--to prove it. The program he has designed has a bug in it, a bug discovered by software tester Roberta Walton. Ethan spends much of the novel tracking the bug down, and helped, at times, by Roberta. The narrative moves forward on two paths--Roberta tells her side of the story from her 2000 vantage point, while an omniscient narrator fills us in on Ethan's disintegrating life. This is a well written story--the plot isn't all that clever or unique, but neither is it predictable. There is much in here of computer codes--but that shouldn't turn the computer neophyte off. I am sure much of that went over my head, but don't think that affected my enjoyment of the novel. The Bug is an entertaining, quick read.
Rating:
Summary: Black humor at a software startup
Review: The main character of The Bug is a PhD dropout from the academic world, hired to do entry-level quality assurance for a small startup in the early 1980's -- who ends up as a high-tech multi-millionaire. The story is that of the first bug she finds, an elusive insect that destroys a life and several careers, before it's finally trapped.The Bug is pure black humor. Ellen Ullman has captured the tedium of debugging code in the early 1980's, the petty-mindededness of *some* of the programmers, and the stress of working under impossible deadlines in programming sweatshops. It's just a pity that the author felt she had to define so many computing terms in such a wordy manner. I can understand that an author needs to make her books accessible to a wide audience, but too many long inserted explanations interrupt the flow of the story and destroy the mood. A glossary of terms at the back might have been a better way of handling technical terms -- or rephrasing technical jargon into ordinary language. Either you already know an acronym -- or you don't care about it. The cause of The Bug, as it's finally revealed, is a letdown. No experienced, intelligent developer (as the protagonist is described) would have missed a simple fencepost error for an entire year. But it doesn't really matter -- the book is meant to have a comic-book quality. This is life at the margins of reality. I'd recommend it for its campy spoof of life at a software shop in the early days of PC development.
Rating: 
Summary: Boring and anti-climactic
Review: The main problem with computer-related works is making programming, debugging, and coding in general interesting to the average person. The Bug: A Novel has the same problem. True stories relating to the early days of graphic programming, far more interesting then this work of fiction, have been archived on BBS and ListServs since the mid-eighties. As the reader follows Berta through a bland life, a computer bug nicknamed "the Jester" comes and goes, prodding the plot to lumber along through a series of tiresome near-conclusions. The bug continually eludes capture because of errors on the part of people we never see, until the very anti-climactic conclusion. While this conclusion is realistic, novels are generally supposed to be interesting and engaging. Even the writing style collapses under scrutiny. Word errors ("that" instead of "think"), switches of tense in mid-sentence, and blocks of pages that simply have C code make this novel lurch about stiffly like Frankenstein's monster. It's as if no editing was involved at all. Only those dedicated to mid-eighties computer history will enjoy this book. It is a work that ceased to be interesting 20 years ago.
Rating: 
Summary: Journey into madness
Review: This is a thoroughly enjoyable story about a programmer's wearying, frustrating and destructive search for a tiny logical error in his program, and his tester's growth into a programmer herself. (In an interview in Salon.com, the author admits that these two characters are elements of herself.) Throughout the book the writing repeats several refrains with slight variations to give the esthetic of playing the same tune over and over again but without conclusion. The book truly brings alive a culture the rest of us never see. So good I had to put it down to savor it for awhile before picking it up again. Sexy too, though not without neuroses. Also, the editors could've used a German spellchecker for the snippets in German. The conclusion of the book is brilliant, tragic but also a celebration of intelligence.
Rating:
Summary: Debugging Life
Review: This is one of the most impressive novels I've read in the last few years. It takes on issues of love, hate, ego and the much written about "human condition" and views them through what to most outsiders seems the most inhuman world of computer technology and software engineering. It takes the reader into the soul of the machine as only a few non-fiction works have previously done - "The Soul Of The New Machine" and Clifford Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg" spring to mind - and weaves a very human story of love, betrayal and madness around and within it.
Ullman's writing is clean, precise and emotionally spot-on, her characters are all too real to anyone who has worked in the software industry. Ethan Levin, software engineer lost between the world of dbx, cc and his broken relationships with human beings, is finely drawn and involving. A flawed tragic character descending into a madness Shakespeare would have recognised instantly. Roberta the software tester and former linguist who becomes a programmer as Ethan decays in front of her is also tragic, lost and very human, if more capable than Ethan of introspection and thus survival.
The wisdom with popular science books is that for every equation they contain the readership is cut in half. I would have thought things would be at least as bad for a novel that contains C code... but not in this case. Ullman fits the technical explanations and some code into the text with admirable dexterity and clarity that anyone should be able to follow. It was a very brave course to take, it could easily have ended up as an indigestible geeky info dump, but she pulls it off extremley well.
Her ability to see the world and relationships through the eyes of men is quite spooky at times, particularly men caught up in the challenges, excitement and self-absorbtion that can be found in the world of code and debugging. She ties it all back to our essential humanity and analog vs digtal world views in a satisfying conclusion.
This is one hell of a book.
Rating: 
Summary: Use with discretion.
Review: This is worth reading if you're interested in computer programming, but, in any case, not wonderful. If you're not interested in computer programming, you should be able to follow it easily, but its virtues won't outweigh its flaws for you. I liked the bug best--the actual bug as explained, that is. Like some of the reviewers I'm a little sceptical that such a thing might go so long undetected, but so what? It's fun; it makes a point; and, anyway, close enough. Essentially, however, this novel is not plot driven; essentially it's a character (psychological) study, one that requires more skill than this first-time novelist can muster. Literary ambition alone doesn't suffice. About the prose: There are great swaths of sentence fragments. The author seems to think they lend an immediacy to the thing. I think they make it clumsy and cheap. I object (also) in particular to 1) the phrase "waiting on" to mean "waiting for" (only restaurant workers wait "on", and "on" is not an all-purpose preposition), to 2) the phrase "Noam Chomsky famously said..." ("famously" here--and everywhere--is superfluous and ugly; you can't indiscriminately add "ly" to every adjective you chance upon), and to 3) "academic" used as a noun (just say "college teacher" or something, if that's what you mean).
Rating:
Summary: Very realistic
Review: Ullman captures the software development process in a startup with accuracy. Her descriptions of programming concepts and debugging give a realistic glimpse into the programmers' world for those who may not be in the field. I enjoyed the book very much. I too have had a "Jester" plague a program I worked on. I wish some of the characters had been developed in more depth however.
Rating:
Summary: Very realistic
Review: Ullman captures the software development process in a startup with accuracy. Her descriptions of programming concepts and debugging give a realistic glimpse into the programmers' world for those who may not be in the field. I enjoyed the book very much. I too have had a "Jester" plague a program I worked on. I wish some of the characters had been developed in more depth however.
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