Rating: 
Summary: Crystaline capsule of steamy urban ambiguity.
Review: Ms. Ullman's book manages to cast some rare natural light on the inner workings of an urban dwelling woman programmer. Her images are as crisp as her Brooks Bros. pajamas...I read the book in one sitting.
Rating:
Summary: The First Mandatory TechnoCulture Reading Ever
Review: My heart danced as I read this book. Although not jewish, bisexual, or female, and although not yet pushing forty myself, Ms. Ullman's work sang through the printed page: Yes! *This* is me! *This* is what I have never been able to convey to those in my life who are not technical people. Contrary to what seems to be the popular opinion, this book is not about sexuality, it is about the chasm between the social world and the abstract world of machine logic. We, the programmers, cannot simultaneously interact according to the organic subtleties of human interaction and also according to the harsh clarity of the machine. In her sexuality and in her memories of her father, Ullman explores the moments of human contact. If you are close to someone who programs computers, you should read Close to the Machine. And that goes double, triple, if you are someone who programs computers.
Rating: 
Summary: THE CRITICS PRAISE CLOSE TO THE MACHINE!
Review: NEWSWEEK, December 8, 1997:
Ellen Ullman, English major turned computer programmer, writes about her rather wacky life with humor and aplomb in this diaristic work, subtitled "Technophilia and Its Discontents." Ullman takes her liberal-arts sensibility and opens a fascinating window onto the culture of people obsessed with ActiveX controls, device drivers and Visual C++. By turns hilarious and sobering, this slim gem of a book chronicles the Silicon Valley way of life--contracts won and projects botched, start-ups that dissolve into thin air, partnerships formed and busted, even Ullman's bizarre romantic entanglement with a self-described anarchocapitalist. The book is chock-full of delicately profound insights into work, money, love, and the search for a life that matters. THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, November 30, 1997:
Part memoir, part techie mantra, part observation on the ever-changing world of computer programming, "Close to the Machine" is the nicely balanced story of a 46-year-old woman coming to terms with middle age in her personal life as well as in her chaotic profession as a software engineer. Ullman comes off as an interesting character, a connoisseur of both fine wine and complex scripting languages ... [An] admirable story of a strong woman standing up to, and facing down, "obsolescence" in two different, particularly unforgiving worlds--modern technology and modern society. WIRED, December 1997:
. . . disjunctions are at play in Ullman's life and in the central intimacy of her identity as a coder: her closeness to the machine. We see the seduction at the heart of programming: embedded in the hijinks and hieroglyphics are the esoteric mysteries of the human mind. THE VILLAGE VOICE, November 4, 1997:
For someone sitting so close to the machine, Ellen Ullman possesses a remarkably wide-angle perspective on the technology culture she inhabits. LA WEEKLY, November 14, 1997:
At some point in Ullman's stories, it should start to dawn on a reader why software turns out the way it does: why "groupware" means never having to say good morning, and why systems geeks prefer email to telephones. Ullman writes of engineers who knew their jobs were ending but continued perfecting their programs anyway; of colleagues who don't speak for days, so thorough is their compulsion to work. It's from such imaginations that the fundamental principles of software are born. "Marketing people talk about it as if these things are built by human interface specialists with psychology degrees," Ullman says. "But what programmers really believe and do determines this technology to a much larger degree than the people who employ them would like to admit. On many levels, the world that programmers live in is being reproduced within the software."
Rating: 
Summary: Avoid this book, or not.
Review: Summary of this book: Queer woman ranting on and on about programming. The book is primarily about her pointless (not contributing much to the plot) conversations between her and other programmers, using buzzwords every other word. The plot seems to have been an afterthought, and is quite dull. If you're a non-programmer type, and would like to be up do date with the buzzwords you throw around left and right at the office, then this is the book for you! Just think: tomorrow you could be saying things like "integrating enterprise wide solutions and reengineering infrastructure to implement a third tier capability of empowering a paradigm!"
Rating: 
Summary: Meloncholy Geeks
Review: The bastard child of Douglas Coupland's "Microserfs" and Marguerite Dumas' "The Lover".
Rating: 
Summary: The technology aspects are excellent.
Review: The book's episodic accounts of her experiences in the industry and her observations regarding the technology's social impact are interesting and thought provoking. Other than that, who cares about your sex life, Ms. Ullman? If I was geuinely interested in such a book I'd know where to find it.
Rating:
Summary: Brave author; interesting combination of history and present
Review: The descriptions of the seduction of computers were the first things I quoted to my engineer friends; each of us recognized at least one trait absolutely, cathartically. Coupland can do that ( though not, I think, as well). Ullmann knocked me over with a sense of historical context analyzed with a nerd's eye - she's seen much of the 'new' before, and can recognize it, knows where it's likely to go. Pattern-matching works better when the matcher has more context to start with, and her life is a lot of context. I suspect she could have made the book much more didactic and 'closed', but chose not to. I found it well worth rereading to pick up the parallels between the different stories she tells, and the cross-implications, but it's subtler than the current run of techno-prognostications.
Rating:
Summary: Poor Organization and Lack of Focus Creates a Snoozer!
Review: The fact that it took me so long to read such a small book should send a signal that something did not exactly click with this book. Working as a technical writer within the technology industry, I related to a great deal of the story. That being said, a great deal of the story had nothing to do with what I thought the theme was to be. The book is marketed as a liberal arts major's mis-adventures in techno-land. I was not interested in the author's personal, sexual life. I wasn't offended by it, just bored. For the author's next book, I'd like to suggest that she creates an outline first and follows it. The book seemed to hop around to many different topics with no real overall purpose.
Rating:
Summary: A dose of claptrap
Review: The woman does know the programming environment, obviously first hand. So what? There's nothing else in this book but demonstration of familiarity with all the current buzzwords (which, let's give credit where it's due, unlike the writers of Wired Magazine and Red Herring, she uses appropriately. That doesn't make a book though, and there's absolutely nothing else there. I wouldn't bother with it.
Rating: 
Summary: Tedious, boring and insulting.
Review: There is really nothing to this book. When I finally finished it I was like "That was it?" Aside from the lack of any kind of interesting or engaging plot I found the very stereotypical charicterizations of programmers to be insulting. I get the feeling that the author is one of those "non-geek" programmers who (incorrectly) thinks that she understands true geek culture and secretly thinks she is better than the geeks.
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