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Summary: A source of Insight..
Review: This book is great if your have some knowledge of Linux and the open source community. The best part is towards the end when you get Linus's moderate opinions of a variety of topics. I just started using Linux in the past few years and I always thought that Linus shared the same views as Richard Stallman. This is not the case at all, it turns out Linus has really practical views when it comes to open source software and IP in general. The first 1/2 of the book is a brief history of Linux. This book is a really quick read. It turned out to be much more entertaining than I originally thought it would be.
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Summary: 1 track per CD sucks!
Review: This review is for the ones who intend to buy the CD version of this book. It has only one track per CD. In other words, if you are listening it in your car and you want to eject the CD in the middle of the story to listen to some music, you will have to start it over from the very beggining of the CD. Other than that the story is great.
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Summary: Scandinavia and California
Review: Like Linus, I grew up in Scandinavia and can easily identify with his childhood. I too as a programmer later moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in California. And yup, life has to be lived for the fun of it. I may not always agree with him, for instance about the survival, social order and entertainment stuff that he before his book talked about at UC Berkeley a year and a half or so earlier. But I can certainly recommend the book. It's not just about computers.
Rating: 
Summary: A very disappointing book
Review: I really wanted to hear Linus' story, in his own words. Unfortunately, this book showed very little organization aside from chronological; there was no underlying *story* there. Just a bunch of disjointed facts presented in chronological order. The personal anecdotes, while interesting, shed very little insight about Linux. I was hoping to get some real insight into Linus the person and how he is reflected in Linux the operating system. To this end, the book failed to deliver.However, I was interested enough in his story to slog through the awful writing in this book. Large sections of text (pages on end) are presented in italics, which make it extremely difficult to read. I don't blame Linus for this abomination of a book: that blame clearly lies with David Diamond since that was *his job*. For folks who really want to read a good book about Linus the person and Linux the operating system, make sure that you read Rebel Code by Glyn Moody. That is a well-written book and thoroughly researched book that places Linux within the context of the open-source movement.
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Summary: A new Copernican revolution
Review: This is a great read, especially the gripping account Linus Torvalds gives of his development of the Linux system as a Helsinki student.. This hovers on the edge of comprehensibility for non-geeks like me, but is immensely informative about how he reached the principles of open source code. The value of the book for me is mainly the opportunity to read a firsthand personal account of a process of discovery. What is particularly interesting is the fact that Linus is someone who constantly develops his own generalizations about the world and his own place in it. This extends far beyond his professional competence, but contains lots of cultural and psychological insight. Indeed he fancies himself as an amateur anthropologist and seems to think that his vision of general human evolution is a big selling point for the book. This consists of the idea that everything goes through three stages representing successive motives for doing it. The prime examples given are sex, war and technology. People do things first for survival, then to promote social order and finally for entertainment, just for fun. This is the direction of general evolution of which he is himself living proof. Apart from this, he offers quite sophisticated national character studies of the Finns, something they and their neighbors are adept at. The great illumination for me is that Linus epitomizes the reincarnation of Kant's Copernican revolution in metaphysics. Copernicus solved the problem of the movement of the heavenly bodies by having the spectator revolve while they were at rest, instead of them revolve around the spectator. Kant extended this achievement for physics into metaphysics. "Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects... (but what) if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge?" (Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason). In order to understand the world, we must begin not with the empirical existence of objects, but with the reasoning embedded in our experience itself and in each of the judgements we have made. Which is to say that the world is inside each of us as much as it is out there. Our task is to bring them together as individuals who share things in common with the rest of humanity. Linus's version of Kantian subjectivity is deeply engaging and his invention takes the method out of metaphysics and back into physics or rather into what physics has been transformed into through computing. What matters is self-in-the-world. It may be that his version of the world is pretty naive in some major areas, owing to his specialized experience of it, but that doesn't stop him from doing his best to develop a worldview all the time. And it is clearly central to his method as a software developer. Moreover, I find myself in fundamental agreement with him in his judgements concerning some important issues, like the politics of capitalism and the ethics of leadership. The most moving aspect of his account for me was his integrity, an integrity that pervaded his drive to establish a 'clean' system based on simple principles which could be extended by anyone to embrace the most complex of problems. He makes it clear that the world of computers permits a small cadre of experts who feel similarly to communicate with each other in a socially progressive way. The presence and absence of money in this process is at first taken to be crucial -- Gates is a businessman, Linus is a software engineer and never the two shall meet. But on moving to the States, Linus discovered that the presence and absence of money, even of big money, was not central. And this is crucial. The 19th and 20th centuries constitute a counter-revolution, launched by Hegel, against Kant's Copernican revolution. The result was a separation of the personal from the impersonal, the subject from the object, humanism from science. This is the split which the decline of state capitalism in the face of the digital revolution is allowing us to reverse. Linus Torvalds embodies the drive to reintegrate the two sides and his autobiography shows how he did it himself. You could say that it has triggered off a Copernican revolution all of my own.
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Summary: Bill Joy Needs Wasabi
Review: This book is a nice little introduction to the history of Linux and Linus Torvalds' view on the open source movement. Surprisingly, he seems a lot less militant than many of the open-source partisans, not really caring one iota for the ideology of the FSF, but revealing his aim as mainly having fun and amusing himself. The writing style is quippy and jumpy, which can get a little annoying sometimes, but it is very readable all the same. Linus talks about himself some and it seems that he fits the stereotypical "geek" pattern (and he doesn't seem to mind this). The most interesting part of the book was when he decided to get serious for a minute and talk abut "Why Open Source Works" . . . his arguments are interesting, but not totally convincing (especially considering Caldera's recent revamping of their licensing schemes). His main concern in that area is the protection of the consumer even though he states that he has no problems whatsoever with closed-source software !or capitalist ideas of how software should be marketed. I think a lot of Linux fanatics will be disappointed with this, as Linus seems to keep clear of the political area and amuse himself mainly with the technical aspects, and seems in fact, far less emphatic in his love of Linux than a lot of his fans are. Although not very good literature, it is an amusing diversion into a new paradigm in software development. Don't expect too much though.
Rating:
Summary: Fun reading
Review: This was a fun book. After reading something like "Hard Drive", which basically details Bill Gates's temper and ambition, and "The Microsoft Way", which is factual without being overly engaging, this book is an absolute pleasure. It's funny, interesting, and occasionally philosophical in a Douglas Adams kind of way. If you're interested in the history or philosophy behind Linux, Linus is the best guy to ask, and he really seems to open up here and say what he thinks. He's refreshingly honest, too, about himself and his opinions about others and technology in general. I think every quote I've seen in a magazine or on-line over the last couple months has come from this book, so if you want the context of the quotes, this is the place to start. It's short, too, so you won't get bogged down in too much of anything. I highly recommend it.
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Summary: Hacking Away in the Frozen Tundra and Silicon Valley
Review: Summary: This book would be a totally unremarkable memoir about a man who just loves to write software code . . . except that the man is "the accidental revolutionary" whose work led to the Linux operating system (considered by many to be the best for Web servers and personal computers) and the open source movement. Those who are interested in the potential for Linux and open source will find that Mr. Torvalds corrects many misimpressions about his life, work, and motivations that have been reported in earlier books by others. The book is entertaining in its candor and humility, but falters with its ending mini-essays on subjects like intellectual property. I graded the book down one star for its more serious efforts, which didn't work so well as the base material. Review: Mr. Tolvalds says that he wanted to create "a fun book . . . and have fun making it . . . ." He mostly succeeded. You will enjoy learning about his views through verbatim accounts describing he and his wife taking care of their children at the same time. "I was an ugly child." He also reports that he had "atrocious taste in clothes." In sum, "I was a nerd." From the time he got his first computer, that's the companion with which he spent most of his life. In the winters in Finland, that's one of the best ways to have fun. "If you're good enough, you can be God. On a small scale." Programming is "an exercise in creativity" and "it's the greatest feeling in the world." It was also a lot more interesting that his schoolwork. Linux started out with his desire to write a disk driver. He posted a message about it to get feedback and the open source movement was underway. But there was no intention to create Linux at that time. It just sort of evolved into a revolution. His personal philosophies are simple and powerful. "Greed is never good." "Well, I want to explain the meaning of life" which he summarizes as being "survival . . . social order . . . entertainment." Each activity moves through those stages. As a result, "civilization is a cult." Those who program will love his descriptions of the machines he owned, the problems he ran into programming them, and how the problems were solved. Although the book is a little bit technical, only those who are technophobes will find it too heavy in this area. He tells you where to skip to if you don't want to read the more technical sections. His explanations of Linux and open source are powerful and simple. "People trust me." But "people can choose to ignore me because they can just do the stuff themselves." He admonishes everyone. "People take me too seriously." After you read this interesting memoir, think about how you could establish more trust with more people. What would you like to accomplish for others, if you could? Be prepared to be an accidental revolutionary. The world needs more of them!
Rating: 
Summary: Inappropriate but good book besides
Review: This book tells you about Linus's childhood from his birth, to when he took all the credit of Richard Stallman's hard work. It really gets you mad at him. He also critisized everyone who had the slightest disaggreement with him, from Richard Stallman, who actually did all the hard work while Linus sat around and drank beer, to Steve Jobs, who didn't aggree with everything that Linus thought. Since we are rating the book and not the person, I would give it 3 stars.
Rating:
Summary: Fun and Interesting Read
Review: Just For Fun accomplished exactly what Linus Torvalds set out to do: make a book and have fun doing it. The reader senses that this has been accomplished throughout the book. The book contains technical elements, but the reader does not necessarily have to be a technical person. Linus himself remarks early in the book that a non-technical reader should skip to page 119 to avoid some technical jargon. Furthermore, the reader does not have to be a die-hard Linux enthusiast to enjoy the book. The book is inspiring and fascinating -- detailing the growth of an operating system, a revolution, an era, and a person. As a computer enthusiast, someone who works in the industry, and someone who has dabbled in Linux over the years, the book opened my eyes to the benefits of the open-source movement. A truly interesting read.
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