The New Hacker's Dictionary - 3rd Edition

Rating:
Summary: Understand Your Fellow Hackers
Review: "The New Hacker's Dictionary" is not an ordinary dictionary.Instead of a regular English dictionary, you get one that is the hacker's dream: a dictionary full of terms used by hackers all over the globe. Then you can really talk with your fellow geeks.

The dictionary is compiled by Eric S. Raymond, a well-known hacker, who is author of the popular book about open source, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". He knows the hacker culture well, and that makes him a good compiler. The third edition of the dictionary adds more than 100 new entries to the already rich list. Among my favourite entries are "larval stage", "scrozzle", and "wave a dead chicken".

Other than the dictionary itself, this book contains two essays, "Confessions of a Happy Hacker" by Guy Steele and "Hacker in a Strange Land" by Eric Raymond, as well as a not-so-short introduction to hacker speech, hacker jargon, and the hacker file in particular. There are three appendices. The first contains some funny stories about hacking in various situations. The second tries to portrait "J. Random Hacker", the most typical hacker. And the last is a short article of how one can help the hacker culture grow.

If you have interacted with other hackers (in Usenet, RL (Real Life), or in other hacker-populated places in the universe), you may have found yourself unable to understand some terms. With "The New Hacker's Dictionary" you can learn all these useful, strange, or simply funny words and thereby become a full-fledged hacker.

Rating:
Summary: still part of the canon
Review: Anyone buying this book thinking they're getting a guide to current slang has missed the point. For that, they can subscribe to Wired. This book is valuable more for historic reasons than any others. I don't mean to belittle the worthwhile efforts made by the maintainers to incorporate current slang, but at any given time the "fresh" material is outweighed by 20-30 years' worth of semi-archival material. And that's as it should be. If anything, ESR tends to phase entries out too quickly. I'd rather see TNHD be the OED than the Entertainment Tonight of computer culture, know what I mean?

(No, I'm not some old fart longing for the glory days of the PDP-1 and TMRC. I'm just a CS student raised on Unix who feels we as a subculture have a heritage that's worth preserving. Maybe the Jargon File/TNHD can serve two purposes, but I think the historical one is more important.)

Rating:
Summary: If you can read this, you should own this book
Review: Forget the Wired Style Guide, forget The Dilbert Future -- if you want to write, speak, or otherwise communicate intelligibly about computers and computer culture, you *need* this book. It's everything you could want in a reference book: smart, authentic, intelligible, painstakingly researched, and funnier than hell. Tech journalists will particularly benefit from this book's handy definitions and historical anecdotes -- in fact, the Jargon File from which it originated is itself a prime artifact of computer-culture history. Frankly, anybody who writes about computers for a living and doesn't have this within easy reach of their desk probably isn't worth hearing from in the first place...

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating and very funny
Review: If you can remember playing "Adventure" on a teletype, this book is for you. And if you're in college, hoping for a job in computing when you graduate, this book is for you too. It's an anarchic compendium of the anarchic vocabulary, habits, and style of the programming profession.

The New Hacker's Dictionary is mostly arranged as a set of alphabetical entries, but there are a couple of excellent appendices, on hacker folklore and on the hacker lifestyle and habits. (Hacker is used here in its original sense of someone who enjoys and is good at programming--Raymond has included both "hacker" and "cracker" as entries, of course.) The entry on folklore is simply hilarious; I wish I could just include Guy Steele's "more magic" story here, but I'll just have to tell you to buy the book.

The entries are a real mixture. Many, such as "indent style", go beyond just defining the term: this entry gives examples of the four major C styles and mentions the holy wars (another entry . . .) which have occurred over them. Some are quite current: Easter egg, kluge, Trojan horse; others are arcane or dated, but still interesting: NeWS, CP/M, chiclet keyboard. All the entries are interesting and well-written.

Newcomers to the field may find a good deal of enlightenment here, and old-timers will find a lot of memories. My own favourite entries relate to the old text-based game Adventure, which I encountered on a CDC machine in 1981. "I see no here." "Plugh!" "Xyzzy!" *Sigh* It almost makes me miss those old teletypes.

Rating:
Summary: The Definitive Guide to Online Jargon
Review: The Jargon File, on which this book is based, has been the definitive guide to online jargon pretty much since there was an online to create jargon about. You may want another book to spell out acronyms and decipher industry-speak, but if you've been thrown in with a bunch of real geeks for the first time and can't understand what seems to be a language of its own, this book is better than Berlitz.

Even people for whom 'foobar' is not a foreign word will enjoy the essays and jokes in The New Hacker's Dictionary, and there's bound to be a phrase or two you can learn from the nerd subculture down the hall.