Customer Reviews

The New Hacker's Dictionary

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2 star:		(1)
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"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.

This isn't a dictionary, it's a thousand slices of hacker history, folklore, and culture aranged in alphabetical order. I've kept this book by my desk for the past decade and I still turn to it for a refreshing mind-spritz when the code is starting to look blurry...

This is one of my favorites: both informative and highly entertaining (perhaps more the latter).

Although the jargon file (from which the bulk of this book's content is taken) is freely available online, the forewords by GLS and ESR are interesting to read, and the Crunchly cartoons are real gems. Besides, it's nice to have the File in book form, especially when not at a computer.

I would normally not consider buying something named "The New Hacker's Dictionary", as the first thing that comes to mind is "drivel for the stupid masses". However, I must say that I was wrong. The "dictionary" is actually by an author who is obviously familiar with the computing days of old - the definitions aren't idiotic new-age garbage, but rather words that most "hackers"/"computer nerds" will recognize - while the regular folk will not. The book doesn't discuss words like "click", "webpage" and any other "popular" computing terms - instead it's words like "foobar", "warez d00dz", "flipflop", etc...

If you're at all interested in classic computing culture, this book is something I feel every computer nerd should have (you fit the description if, among other things, you like monty python and your idea of the perfect evening is spending it at home programming, with occasional breaks to watch the X-Files).

If you're a soccermom, or a script/warez kiddie, this book is not for you. You probably won't understand it, and will certainly not appreciate it.

It is really nice to be able to peruse this book in the flesh rather than on the computer screen and if you frequently are looking at the HTML version then you will not be dissapointed by this book. If you have never read this book then do a quick web search and check out the HTML version first.

Actually I owned the previous print edition and read it cover to cover, while I've only consulted this later version on line. The book has a lot of excellent information, and used to be the definitive reference for technobabble. And the comics include some classics and I'm fairly sure I've never seen them on the Web...

However, these days when I try to find the latest terms, too often--actually most often--they are not here. This seems to be a fundamental mechanical problem. This dictionary was originally compiled in a different era and using techniques that were appropriate to those times and to the available technologies. That meant mostly the newsgroups and email, and a volume of information that could be filtered by a few moderately dedicated volunteers. The main change now is just the explosion of new technical terms, and though many of these new candidate words are current among far more users than ever contributed to this dictionary, the old approaches just can't deal with it.

It's a very good book, and worth reading, but IMO mostly as a historical and etymological reference. Many important terms are definitely included, and even some of the obsolete terms have had influences on later terminology, but the book just isn't current enough or broad enough to capture the current scope of computer-related technologies.

This book gives some great insight into the mind of the hacker. And note hacker, NOT cracker! Hackers are unjustly maligned by the media as being evil types who just want to wreak havoc on big business and government computer systems, when in reality they view breaking in on security systems as a hobby and almost always alert the authorities to the system break-in.

This dictionary of hacker terms (which can be hilarious, informative, or esoteric depending on their meaning) gives an idea of the creativity and mentality of the hackers and their distrust of huge corporations (ie "Broken Windows" for Sun's "Open Windows," "Windoze" for Microsoft Windows, and so on). Reading though the definition of terms gives you an idea of how to "talk turkey" with said hackers, and even if I will always be just a "wannabe" hacker, it helps to be able to get an idea of the mindset of the hacker.

At the back of the book, there's even a brief compilation of hacker "folklore" and "legends," a portrait of a "typical hacker," and ways to help the hacker culture grow (like getting a free Unix system or contributing to organizations like the Free Software Foundation).

Books like this one, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and Open Sources give an excellent view of the hacker culture.

This is a one-of-a-kind piece of work, and the number of editions to date demonstrates the effort put into this Herculean task.

Somewhat thorough in its meanings and comprehensive in its listings, more esoteric terms could have been given longer descriptions, examples, or just better detailed explanations. This is reference material indeed, and one that will be useful if you need definitions on the lingo of the Hacker world, past and present.

Blargh. Ignore the twinks and their burbling flamage - the yellow book is a moby frob and the source of all good bits. The 3rd Ed has the X nature. It is a region in an otherwise flat entity which is not actually present, fnord, a brain-dump suitable for neep-neeps. So screw the manglers, marketroids and pseudo-suits, kill that point-and-drool interface, and plug into the screaming tty.

It is a Good Thing.

First of all, much of the jargon here is very dated. And since there's very little feeling of respect for any sort of legacies from the past amongst software engineers, I doubt many modern day hackers give any credence to anything that is in here just because it is "historical" or "traditional".

More importantly, software engineers as a breed have been shown to be amoral and power and money hungry. Witness Bill Gates and all the rest. There is very little that is "cute" or "happy" about such people, in my opinion. In fact, I doubt your modern day hacker even bothers to make up cute little jargon anymore to amuse himself. He doesn't need to, he can take a weekend and go snowboarding in the Alps, or indulge some other sybaritic taste.

The only value this book has is as a nostalgia piece for people who initially got into computers 25-30 years ago.