Rating: 
Summary: As Interesting for Non-Technical Types As Hackers
Review: A friend of mine introduced me to this book and I am glad that he did. While I am not a programmer and, as a result, got lost a couple of times in the essays, "Beating the Averages" and "The Dream Language", I wholeheartedly recommend this book. It clearly and crisply explains the art and science of programming and where it fits into a larger historical and social context. It also provides many thought-provoking insights for technical and non-technical folks alike. You can see in Graham's writing style his passion for simple, succinct prose as well as code. It was a very pleasurable read.
Rating:
Summary: Put my thoughts into words
Review: After graduating in 2004, I walked away with the exact thoughts as this essay, (Why Nerds are Unpopular). I was neither a "nerd", nor was I the coolest person. I mastered the art of being friends with everyone and viewing the false world of high school objectively. I have never seen an essay as accurate as this, parallel to my views and experiences. The only problem is there is a "berlin wall" between people knowing these facts and details, and actually acting to make a change. Till then, the nomenclature, nerds, will stand.
Rating: 
Summary: Read it carefully
Review: Graham presents 15 essays revolving around computer programming. From his own background, he extols the virtues of breaking out on your own and forming a startup. If you are very capable as a programmer and you can find a few others (<10) of similar ability, and you then tackle a hard problem that afflicts many, great success might be yours. He cautions that of course, most startups fail. Some of his suggestions are intriguing and have been said by others. Like when he suggests doing hard problems, because these act as a barrier to entry to your competitors. He also suggest using Lisp as a development language, claiming that it gives you a productivity edge over someone coding in a different, less capable language. But he also says that large support libraries are also important. Well, in many applications, this latter factor may outweight using Lisp. For example, a Java programmer would not relish giving up her Swing graphics or the Collection classes, or have to recode these in Lisp if she can't find the equivalent functionality in an existing Lisp library. Likewise, a C++ programmer doesn't want to abandon the Standard Template Library. His chapter on using Bayesians against spam is outdated from the moment this book was published. Since Bayesians started getting deployed by mail servers, spammers have responded by poisoning the Bayesians. They put words or entire sentences that have innocuous content. In fact, content that is likely to occur in non-spam messages. This has been happening since late 2003. (Just yesterday, 28 May 2004, the Wall St Journal carried an article describing the phenomenon.) The broadening causes two things. Firstly, it increases the chances that a spam passes through the Bayesian and into your inbox. Secondly, and worse, it increases the chances that a non-spam gets misdiagnosed by the Bayesian as spam. If it then gets put into your spam mail directory, you may never see it. Overall, this book has some good ideas. But be cautious and don't accept everything in it.
Rating:
Summary: Painters and Hackers: How Many Are We?
Review: Hello Paul,
I read your essays "Hackers and Painters" and "Taste for
Makers", and I find them GREAT, even if many months later
the first publication. I searched the Internet since 1995+ for texts like yours,
but I was able to find *zero* occurrencies of the big
evidence: painters and hackers share common traits. Of course, they are akin not in the foolish sense that one
can write a program to display some pixels at random or
fixed positions.
Instead, painters and hackers are equals in taste, design,
and skecthing. I studied painting at Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan, but
I thinker with computers since I was 12, I started with an
Apple IIe clone built by my brother (when he was 18) using
a do-it-yourself kit.
Now I work as a "corporate drone" programmer in Milan. That's why when I read your essays I was so impressed:
I am not smart enough to be a "real hacker," AND I am not
good enough to be a famous painter, but today this Middle
Land seems to me no longer too much strange. Thanks Paul,
Claudio Destro PS:
To be a painter or to be an hacker, that's the question. I really need to stress the fact that I am really split in
two personalities (as seen from the outside, of course.)
In fact, when I was 14~15, I was really stucked (for about
two years) on the following (in)decision: to study fine
arts or to study information technology? Did I choose correctly? The fact that now I am a "corporate
drone" programmer makes me think "No, I did not choose
correctly." Indeed, the fact that you, a _real_ computer
scientist, wrote such essays, makes me think that at least
I was right.
Rating:
Summary: Thus spake St.Paul ...
Review: I have been reading Paul Graham's articles ever since he popped up on Slashdot a couple of years back. I was so excited to hear about the book, that I pre-ordered without waiting for the local edition that is 3-4x cheaper. I don't believe in objective reviews and ,strongly recommend this book to any above average nerd-types who have been suffering in silence in corporate software development environments. If you are deeply puzzled/frustrated with middle management, kool-aid languages/technology,etc., this book will provide you with deep insights into why things are the way they are. The book is chockful of ideas and hints for getting out the nightmare, that a lot of dev groups are/have turned into. Start your own company , he says ! Why ? Because only in startups do measurability and leverage both ensure that you get what you are worth. In the typical corporate dev environment judging a person's worth or something more tangible like, contributions to specific projects is next to impossible for the typical IT manager. It doesn't matter how hard you work, since the average middle manager cannot measure your contribution. Forget leverage in large groups - you can do very little to alter the course of events in your dept. A few quotes from "How to make wealth" : *'To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage.You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that decisions you make have a big effect'
*'Smallness = Measurement'
* 'Technology = Leverage'
* 'Economically you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays well in technology, where you can earn a premium for working fast.' This book is not crassly materialistic or anything of that sort - except for the chapters "How To make wealth", "Mind the Gap", and "Programming Languages explained" the other chapters are available on the author's website, and that covers a whole range of topics from LISP, the advantages of web based software, Design, etc. The author does appear to paint with broad brush at times, but the book is overwhelmingly full of fresh insights ,and I think all the negative reviews are missing the wood for the trees.
Rating:
Summary: Great book, history and sociology of hacker ethic
Review: I just read this recently because I always found the hardback price for this book a little prohibitive. It is well worth it.
Like many, I first encountered Graham upon reading his essay about "Why Nerds are Unpopular" his simple, golden, thesis really hit home and explained the situation accurately. On this premise, I followed-through with the purchase of the book.
I feel Graham operates in narrative economics or economic histories. His essays are not laden with statistics / numbers (but they do show when called for) but his valuation of the culure of The High School, The Corporation, The History of The Creation of the Third Estate (mercantile class) follows that narrative explanation of politics and economics along the lines of _Kapital_ or _The Wealth of Nations_ or de Toqueville (albeit with much less dead wood).
Graham spares no feelings concerning the problems with the culture of institutions that squander talent: the corporation and the high school.
In the latter apathetic teachers (who wouldn't be on their pittance, no thanks to the "education president"), a contrived world with messed up priorities in a contrived world with 'create more suburban affluent children' as its *only* priority, etc.
In the former people rarely find the opportunity to be, as Steve Jobs says, Insanely Great.
Graham tracks out a hacker superclass, Nietzschean overmen Ayn Rand-scale egos and the skills to back it up. In some ways, Graham is a more effective demonstration of the principles of _Atlas Shrugged_ than that pile of dreck itself is.
Rand-haters, don't let that dissuade you from the purchase! Graham is not operating on the "everyone owes us" model of genius , he's operating on the "where can we best be free to explore".
...and his question of "where can we best be free to explore" ultimately gets a historical treatment: Amsterdam 17th c., Florence 15th c., etc. It's a real treat to have read this right after finishing Stephenson's _Quicksilver_ - a fictional exploration of the intersection of commerce and genius and then a non-fiction explanation of the latter.
In addition to this social history component of the book there are some in-depth tech chats. You could skip these if you want only the social history angle, but I found his case for learning the LISP programming language compelling.
I'd recommend this book for any hacker or anyone who wants to understand their hacker (hint, hint, bosses) or any ignored wives / girlfriends who realize that to love a hacker puts them in a long tradition of very patient, and very much revered ladies.
In all, a real treat that repays the reader's time investment handily.
Rating:
Summary: A great collection of essays about the Hacker world
Review: I saw this book on O'Reilly's site and was quite interested, so I ordered it. The quick review? It was a very interesting read, and at least half of it is understandable to people with all varieties of computer knowledge, as Graham is very good at explaining things simply.
It's basically a collection of essays that Graham (a Lisp programmer, an artist, and one of the parners who started Viaweb, which produced a web-based online store creator which was bought by Yahoo! and to this day runs the Yahoo Store). The essays all flow very nicely with each other, so there are few parts in the book that feel random. And definately go from easy to understand to everyone, into more complex as the book goes on.
He explains a lot of typical "Hacker" (good programmers, not people who illegally break into computers!) culture, and compares it to other art forms. He starts out by explaining nerds, and why they are so unpopular in school, a fun chapter that makes me feel a bit better about being such a nerd in High School. The book goes into internet startups, programming languages, and it's only in the last three or four chapters that he gets into specifics which may lose the ordinary reader. Still, from the chapters preceding those you get a great snapshot of the Hacker world.
I was very pleased with how he used his artist background to draw historical and artistic parallels between the art world and the computer world. And these strong associations really made this book different from others that I've read hacker culture.
This book was definately worth my time.
Rating:
Summary: Essays online
Review: I want to quickly point out that many of the essays in this collection are available in their entirety on the author's website (paulgraham.com), along with a lot of his other essays not published in "Hackers and Painters." (In fact, at least at the time of this review, the title essay itself is available on Graham's website.) By reading Graham's works online, you can get a pretty good sense of his "big ideas," and thus better decide whether or not you need to purchase this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Read a few of his online essays first
Review: In our celebrity worshipping culture, it seems that getting the limelight or making a large amount of money by themselves confer great wisdom. Paul Graham is undoubtedly a very intelligent man and a talented software developer who was able to make a lot of money back in the bubble days. As you read his essays, though, you will be disappointed to find that he is no wiser nor more capable of "Big Ideas" than you or I.
His essays are expressions of personal opinion and taste. He seems to believe in absolute truths, but disguises his beliefs as philosophical analysis. His views on wealth creation are those of a <em>nouveau riche</em> techie, unable to see the miserable lifestyles billions of others call life. If we are not wealthy it is because we simply don't have what it takes, period.
You won't find much substance behind his arguments, just vague analogies, anecdotes, and cherished beliefs. Frankly, his point of view verges on the magical-religious, rather than the scientific. Musings on art and aesthetics make it quite clear that he prefers representational art over abstract. I can only wonder if that terrible phrase "But is it really Art?" has ever touched his lips.
He hints that he is a Libertarian, and his essays bear this out. Not a very convincing one, but the more common sort that is unable to see that other people's lives do not resemble his own. It is baffling that Libertarians of this stripe are unable to see that laws exist because many people break them. For him, those without wealth are simply not motivated enough to take the bull by the horns and be successful. Most people are not wealthy not necessarily out of laziness, but but due to a gamut of other causes as well. Some of these causes can be resolved and the person freed to a Libertarian dream life, but some cannot. It is the latter that Paul and others of his ilk simply cannot understand. This shallowness pervades his two essays on wealth. It seems he believes the problem to be that people are upset that some people are wealthy. Wrong, Paul. The greatest problem facing humanity today, bar none, is that so many billions of people are trapped in grinding poverty. Little talks on start-ups and IPOs are essentially irrelevant. He is convinced that most wealthy people alive today are wealthy due to their pluck, focus, and high-achiever drive. In his view of history, it was during the Industrial Revolution that "wealth creation definitively replaced corruption as the best way to get rich." No mention is made of whether slavery or exploitation are an acceptable component of "wealth creation." In his own words, "it seems [odd] to say that it's <em>unjust</em> that certain kinds of work are underpaid," emphasis his.
He has a Programming Language essay where he derides "inexperienced programmers' judgements about the relative merits of programming languages," and goes on to make disparaging winks and nods in the direction of Java. He makes it quite clear throughout the book that Lisp is the language of choice. I assume we can look forward to his Lisp implementations of OpenGL and ecommerce web sites. Absurd? Of course!
An essay about what programming languages will look like a hundred years from now is trapped in the present. His worries are of compiler optimizations and concise syntax, concerns that may have been central over the past 50 years, but will have faded into the background a century from now. Even though he estimates that computers will be at least a million times more powerful then than now, he expects programs written for them in these futuristic languages would "run acceptably well on our hardware." The only interesting remark in the chapter is that such languages might "make a great pseudocode."
I have many more gripes, but I do not pretend to be especially wise myself. I am a developer of average skill and intelligence, but if even I can see so many glaring errors and simplistic opinions, how can this book have gotten past the O'Reilly editors so easily? Nevertheless, I recommend this book. It will stimulate your thinking regardless of where you stand on the issues he discusses.
Rating: 
Summary: Paul Graham and Rupert Pupkin
Review: It's rare for me to start a book and stop reading it midstream. I am pretty good at picking books which will hold my attention. So I was surprised when I came to a paragraph in _Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age_ by Paul Graham which brought me to a complete stop. I can't read any further. Here's the sentence: "... most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics." (p. 43) Graham says this in the context of wondering whether scientists are smarter than other people, and he wonders about this in an early chapter of the book called "What You Can't Say." As Graham so aptly demonstrates here, you can say lots of things without providing evidence or support. Graham thinks that we will be interested in his unsupported opinions. Graham can say these things. He can write them down. He can publish them. But we don't have to read them. I started worrying about the book while reading the very first chapter, "Why Nerds are Unpopular." This isn't a question I'm interested in, but clearly it is of interest to Graham. Guess what: he was an unpopular nerd, and now that he has the floor, it's his chance to get back. The reflections in this chapter bear a remarkable similarity to the fantasies of Rupert Pupkin in the film "The King of Comedy." Graham footnotes his claim about French literature and physics as an example of something you just don't say in academia. And that's just another unsupported claim, now in a footnote. Of course people say things like this all the time. Graham thinks he's a risk taker, a proponent of "big ideas." There are big ideas, and a few cute remarks, but Rupert Pupkin had those too, and I wouldn't waste my time reading a book by him either.
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