by strick

How can I become a hacker?

You can't. But you can read about us!

Actually many things can be hacked, but since my specialty is computers, internet, and crypto, I'll give you my reading list:

 


Annotation by rupe :
Other worthy books:
  • Hackers - Heroes of the Computer Revolution Steven Levy. Levy gives an eminently readable (and non-technical) overview of how hacking culture developed, from the days of TECO and PDP-11's at MIT, up to the phreaker / BBS culture of the late 80's and early 1990s. This book inspired me to start writing code, wire networks, and play around inside SprintLink as a freshman in HS :-).
  • Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet I picked this slim paperback up last year, expecting it to be a diluted, shallow account of Internet history, written for your typical AOLer. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Hafner & Lyon paid good attention to detail, and gave a good account of the people, politics and technical issues that surrounded the birth of ARPAnet, and its eventual merge into the larger Internet. Very readable, and includes some historic images of early hardware and the people who made it all happen.
  • Eric S. Raymond has a draft of a document entitled The Art of UNIX Programming, which is as much a philosophical treatise on the mind-set needed to write good code in the UNIX environment, as it is a technical reference. Very good reading... ESR speaks wise words. Every young programmer should read it.

 


 
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