Rating: 
Summary: Very good book on topics of interest to Hackers
Review: Paul Graham founded a company and got rich during the Internet-boom years. His essays regularly get posted to /.Shashdot.org. Most, if not all, of the book appeared originally on his web site.
Paul Graham is one of the few good commentators on the current state of what are called hacking, programming, and/or the Computer Business today. Of course, all of these are, in part, tied to the greater Internet geek culture that has arisen in the last decade. He writes about many varied topics, including being a nerd and programmer, running a business, and other more esoteric as well as down-to-earth topics. These topics tie together into what could be called an overall theme of Internet geek culture or simply hacking.
Graham is a good writer and understands his topics. Those who claim he's jumping all over the place must not be members of the hacking sub-culture. But this is a collection of essays. So, multiple topics are allowed. However, all of his concerns are directed at a narrow audience, made up of people in that culture. So, outsides may not understand the context of it and see it as commentaries on a unified whole.
As to those who commented on his politics... I don't know if he really has any. If he has any I would guess it would be some form of diluted Libertarianism.
Overall, he appears to tackle subjects similar to those taken up by Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software), Richard Gabriel and Jerry Pournelle of Chaos Manor (when he's discussing computers).
Overall, Graham is somebody whose work I read on a regular basis. I don't always agree with his viewpoint, but he'll always make me think, and that's more than most writers accomplish.
Rating:
Summary: Worth reading even if you don't agree with it
Review: Paul Graham is an interesting character. He is both an outstanding hacker -- he created the software that became the foundation for Yahoo's shopping site and was an early advocate for Bayesian spam-filtering -- and an artistic painter. Mr. Graham sees no contradiction in all of this -- in fact he considers hacking and art to be nearly synonymous; hence, the title for this book (and an essay contained in the book).*Hackers and Painters* is an anthology of some of Paul Graham's more provocative essays and lectures. The essays range from exploring the anthropology/sociology of hacking -- nerds (who as an earlier reviewer pointed out are unpopular) and the select of group of computer enthusiasts known as 'hackers.' The book also has his essays advocating the use of Lisp and Bayesian spam-filtering. The book also contains essays that can be considered social commentary (about academics, etc.). I do NOT agree with all of what Paul Graham has to say. I do not think that Lisp is as useful a language as Paul Graham claims it to be. I don't appreciate his disparaging of concepts (and people) contrary to his own (e.g., bashing Perl, uncharitable remarks about computer scientists and mathematicians, etc.) Some of his social commentary seem ill informed or naive. BUT -- in spite of all of that -- Paul Graham's essays are well worth reading. Where I do AGREE with him, I really appreciate his insights. I'm a big fan of his essay "Why nerds are unpopular" (contained in this book). With some reservations, I also admire his essays "Hackers and Painters" and essays on Bayesian spam-filtering. Paul Graham is a great writer. If he wasn't so successful with programming in Lisp, he could have become just as successful with writing in the English language. Although his interest in writing is somewhat secondary to his many other interests, Paul Graham is extraordinary gifted in this arena as well. It's refreshing to see that -- contrary to stereotypes -- a hacker can be both a gifted artist and writer. As for the complaint about Paul Graham's alleged disparaging of French lit PhDs. Frankly, I have heard many humanities types openly and crassly referring to scientist/engineering/technical types as idiots or worse, and vice versa. While I don't agree with chauvanism by left-brainers, make no mistake, right-brainers are also capable of narrow-minded snobbery as well. (BTW, what does comparing Paul Graham to some comedian have to do with anything? I prefer "unpopular nerds" like Paul to morons like the other reviewer from L.A.)
Rating:
Summary: Software as an Art Form
Review: Paul Graham penned a unique book: A collection of essays that combine personal and business experience.
The author sees great software development as an art form.
"Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty," Graham writes. "If you look inspire good software, you will find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too."
The collection offers readers positive advice and leadership tips; a roadmap to what is increasingly becoming a computerized future.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent overall with really poor bits
Review: The book is a mixture of IT-related and non-IT-related chapters. There is an ongoing theme about computing and "hacking", but the main topic in some of the chapters is not IT definitely. I loved these. He talks about secondary education in the USA, heretical thoughts, distribution of wealth, spam and design. He is insightful and sometimes brilliant. 9 out of 10 for these chapters. I am not giving him a 10 because I have my reservations of his application of blatant neoliberal ideas (as if they were the only alternative) to the discussion of wealth generation.
The really bad news is, the chapters on programming are extremely poor. After reading the table of contents and the first two chapters (on non-IT topics), I was thinking to myself: "well, perhaps this book contains the first serious approach ever to defending open source software", and "maybe this guy has a chapter as good as this on the philosophy underpinning different programming languages". What a disappointment! 1 out of 10 here.
Non-IT chapters are rigurously documented (I read all the end notes) and solidly argumented. The chapters on computing, on the other hand, are full of non-substantiated statements and weak arguments. They are nort much worse than the average crappy article you can find on the web, but after the excellence of the rest of the book, it as a surprise hard to bear.
I will give you some examples. The book's publication date is May 2004, although I assume that some of the chapters were written some time ago. Graham says in the book that he rewrote some of the essays just for the book, though, so I assume that he had the opportunity to fix problems and add updated material on the older chapters. Despite of this, he repeats nonsensical statements like that applications that run on a given operating system tend to be written in the same lenguage as the operating system. Well, that could have been true 20 years ago. Perhaps 10. But not now. Windows NT, 2000 and XP are majorly written in C/C++. How many business applications are written in C/C++? Not many. Most are written in Visual Basic, Java or even Delphi. Odd enough, Graham does not even mention .NET (or anything related to .NET) in his book. How can this be absent from a discussion on computer programming published in 2004?
Near the end of the book, Graham writes about the success of his startup Viaweb. And he claims that the first cause of their success was that they chose a "better" programming language than the ones that everyone else was using at the moment. They chose Lisp. And he correlates using Lisp to being successful, in their case. He goes on enumerating the unique features of Lisp and explaining how Lisp is the best language. Not for him, not for any particular kind of application. Simple, the best. I immediately suspected something: this guy was successful not because Lisp is the best, but because he is very good at using Lisp. And I was right. It turns out that Graham is an expert in Lisp. Surprise, surprise. How come that he chose Lisp? Maybe the fact that he had published 2 books on Lisp helped a little? Perhaps he was still writing the second one when he started Viaweb. But he was definitely into Lisp before that. If he had been an expert in Java, I bet he would have chosen Java and wrote a book explaining how they succeeded because they chose Java, the absolute best language. Of course we tend to choose the tools we are familiar with, and we are most productive with them. Graham himself talks about this in his book. Why then is he trying to convince us that Lisp was the absolute cause of their success? Biased, biased.
The most disappointing passage of the book, however, is "Open Source", a short section in chapter 10. Graham arguments that open source is better because it has a major difference with non-open source: you get the source code so you can change it if you want to. Come on! I can't imagine my mom, in a hypothetical open-source-dominated future, saying "well, I don't really like how OpenOutlook handles my outgoing e-mail, so this afternoon I will rewrite the SMTP engine". Graham seems a brilliant guy, so I am sure he realises that _the_vast_majority_of_computer_users_ do not have technical training in programming. For these people, having the source code means nothing. It's useless. Just a heap of weird text that they cannot understand. Is like getting the electronics diagrams and schematics of your DVD player when you buy it. If you find something wrong or something you don't like, just grab a screwdriver, a soldering iron, and fix it! Hahahaha! Ridiculous. Graham goes on "You can't fix bugs in Microsoft Windows because you don't have the source code". Wrong. You can't fix bugs in Windows because you (i.e. the vast majority of computer users) don't know how to program. Having the source code would not help whatsoever. It gets even more ludicrous some lines later: "...the advantage of open source isn't just that you can fix it when you need to. It's that everyone can." Really? Everyone? My mom included? I'm rolling on the floor laughing. Furthermore, Graham states that "open source software has fewer bugs than non-open source because more people has looked at its source code and bugs have been fixed". He does not provide any backing or reference for this. Applying common sense, I would say that many more people have looked at Windows than to Linux, for example. And therefore Windows is much more tested than Linux. These people do not look at the source code, but this is not important. We are talking about the functionality of the operating system, and that's what people test when they use it everyday in a variety of situations. Another manifestation of this is the huge number of viruses and exploits that exist on Windows as compared to Linux. It is evident, since many more people are working on it, around it and against it. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" may be true, but when applied to the eyeballs of millions of people using Windows, not the people looking at the source code of Linux. I don't claim this to be an absolute truth, but it comes from common sense and is, at least, an alternative worth considering. Graham does not even mention it.
It seems evident that Graham has fallen into equating "everyone" with "hackers like me". Reality is different. Reality is that only a small fraction of computer users have training in programming. And of those, only a fraction would be willing to rewrite part of an operating system, even if it is wrong! Graham should look beyond himself and his immediate circle. He has demonstrated capable of doing that superbly in some of the other chapters in the book, and even boasts about taking his brain into unconventional terrain as an intellectual exercise. So why is he so narrow-minded here? Beats me.
Oh, well. I recommend the book. It's nice reading, refreshing and extremely interesting. Just skip the bad bits.
Rating: 
Summary: Very entertaining...
Review: This collection of essays is an excellent read. Rather than another tome of technical instructions that will be outdated by the time you read this, the author talks about the philosophy behind the culture of programming. Although there is an essay on how hackers compare to other artists, the premise of the book is really about hackers, their behavior, and motivations. One of the things I like most about the book is the true but sometimes contrarian and controversial nature of the information. It's very well thought out, and the positions are easily defended, but there's a good deal in here that is not obvious because it runs contrary to what you might think if you aren't from the programming world. A very entertaining read, I didn't want to put it down until I finished.
Rating:
Summary: Graham's good fortune is my good fortune...
Review: While it's possible that Mr. Graham didn't start a business and sell it for (I imagine) a mint to Yahoo! just so he would have time to edify me with his writings, it has worked out that way. I bought this book as much because I owe him for all the information I've picked up off his website (and the two Lisp books I bought used, including a PRISTINE copy of On Lisp that somebody sold at half.com for $25.00) as because I thought I would find the subject matter of particular interest. But what do I know? It's all fascinating. And well-written, too, if you can forgive Graham's habit of beginning sentences with "and."
Blaise Pascal once wrote, "I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter." Mr. Graham has taken to time to make this book shorter. I highly recommend to to geeks, nerds, and even unscarred smart people everywhere.
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