Product Description

"A sprightly lexicon." -- William Safire, New York Times Magazine "For anyone who likes to have slippery, elastic fun with language, this is a time for celebration. . . . The New Hacker's Dictionary . . . is not only a useful guidebook to very much un-official technical terms and street tech slang, but also a de facto ethnography of the early years of the hacker culture." -- Mondo 2000 "My current favorite is `wave a dead chicken.' New to you? You've waved a dead chicken when you've gone through motions to satisfy onlookers (suits?), even when you're sure it's all futile. Raymond's book exhilarates. . . . The New Hacker's Dictionary, though, is not for skimming. Allot, each day, a half hour, severely timed if you hope to get any work done." -- Hugh Kenner, Byte

This new edition of the hacker's own phenomenally successful lexicon includes more than 100 new entries and updates or revises 200 more. Historically and etymologically richer than its predecessor, it supplies additional background on existing entries and clarifies the murky origins of several important jargon terms (overturning a few long-standing folk etymologies) while still retaining its high giggle value.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #762492 in Books
• Published on: 1996-10-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 547 pages

Amazon.com Review
This third edition of the tremendously popular Hacker's Dictionary adds 100 new entries and updates 200 entries. In case you aren't familiar with it, this is no snoozer dictionary of technical terms, although you'll certainly find accurate definitions for most techie jargon. It's the slang and secret language among computer jocks that offers the most fun. Don't know what the Infinite-Monkey Theorem is? Or the meaning of "rat dance?" It's all here. Most people don't sit down to read dictionaries for entertainment, but this is surely an exception.

Review
"A sprightly lexicon."
—William Safire, New York Times Magazine

"For anyone who likes to have slippery, elastic fun with language, this is a time for celebration. . . . The New Hacker's Dictionary . . . is not only a useful guidebook to very much un-official technical terms and street tech slang, but also a de facto ethnography of the early years of the hacker culture."
—Mondo 2000

"My current favorite is `wave a dead chicken.' New to you? You've waved a dead chicken when you've gone through motions to satisfy onlookers (suits?), even when you're sure it's all futile. Raymond's book exhilarates. . . . The New Hacker's Dictionary, though, is not for skimming. Allot, each day, a half hour, severely timed if you hope to get any work done."
—Hugh Kenner, Byte

About the Author
Eric S. Raymond is an independent developer and writer.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating and very funny
If you can remember playing "Adventure" on a teletype, this book is for you. And if you're in college, hoping for a job in computing when you graduate, this book is for you too. It's an anarchic compendium of the anarchic vocabulary, habits, and style of the programming profession.

The New Hacker's Dictionary is mostly arranged as a set of alphabetical entries, but there are a couple of excellent appendices, on hacker folklore and on the hacker lifestyle and habits. (Hacker is used here in its original sense of someone who enjoys and is good at programming--Raymond has included both "hacker" and "cracker" as entries, of course.) The entry on folklore is simply hilarious; I wish I could just include Guy Steele's "more magic" story here, but I'll just have to tell you to buy the book.

The entries are a real mixture. Many, such as "indent style", go beyond just defining the term: this entry gives examples of the four major C styles and mentions the holy wars (another entry . . .) which have occurred over them. Some are quite current: Easter egg, kluge, Trojan horse; others are arcane or dated, but still interesting: NeWS, CP/M, chiclet keyboard. All the entries are interesting and well-written.

Newcomers to the field may find a good deal of enlightenment here, and old-timers will find a lot of memories. My own favourite entries relate to the old text-based game Adventure, which I encountered on a CDC machine in 1981. "I see no here." "Plugh!" "Xyzzy!" *Sigh* It almost makes me miss those old teletypes.

Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted
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.

The Definitive Guide to Online Jargon
The Jargon File, on which this book is based, has been the definitive guide to online jargon pretty much since there was an online to create jargon about. You may want another book to spell out acronyms and decipher industry-speak, but if you've been thrown in with a bunch of real geeks for the first time and can't understand what seems to be a language of its own, this book is better than Berlitz.

Even people for whom 'foobar' is not a foreign word will enjoy the essays and jokes in The New Hacker's Dictionary, and there's bound to be a phrase or two you can learn from the nerd subculture down the hall.