Watson, Thomas J ., Jr., and Peter Petre. Father, Son & Co. : My Life at IBM and Beyond. New York : Bantam Books, 1990 . BOOK EVIEW When you're a hacker, your tube-time allocation can drive you right into trogolodyte mode . I know . Here I am, brain fried and suffering raster burn because of the angry fruit salad that passes for a WIMP environment on my xterm. I've changedphase twice already this week, chasing pointers to a heisenbug thatkeeps hosing thesystem . What this code needs, IMHO , is a featurectomy, but then it wouldn't have enough bells, whistles, and gongs to make it flavorful for the marketroids and salescritters . Worse still, the debugger I've got to work with is bletcherous in the extreme. It goes offthe trolly andjumps offinto never-never land almost as often as the code . Frustratedp ? T ! One more branch to Fishkill and I'm going back to bit bashing the bare metal and examining the entrails . I should blow away the debugger before it gronks out , and roaches my new patches in the process . Maybe I can completely rework itso itdoes the Right Thing . Not rightnow, though . Although the winnage would be high, it's a moby project, and I promised a friend I'd snarf some wall time to do a brain dump on what I think of this book on hackish speech . Trouble is, I don't know what to write . (Thanks to Kevin Djang for helping with the "hacker thoughts" passage.) Rajeev Pandey Department of Computer Science Oregon State University Corvallis, Oregon 97331-3202 Computers & Society, Vol. 23, No. 1-2, July 1993 The New Hacker's Dictionary edited by Eric Raymond forward and cartoons by Guy L . Steele Jr. (MIT Press 1991, 433 pages, 24 cartoons, $10.95) Every culture acquires its own jargon, and the programming community is no exception . The New Hacker's Dictionary serves to shed light on the fascinatingjargon of programmers. Passages like the one presented below will make complete sense (if they don't already) if you are armed with The New Hacker's Dictionary . All ofthe emphasized text in the passage below appear as entries in the The New Hacker's Dictionary, a fascinating compendium of the hacker lexicon. This is no dry technical reference, however, serving more as a snapshot of electronic culture today. Along with explanations ofhacker slang, sections illuminate jargon construction, detail hacker folklore and humor, and present a composite portrait of the prototypical hacker . The forwards by Guy L. Steele Jr. and Eric Raymond are fascinating as well. A bibliography serves to direct readers to other works that shed light on the hacker mindset . Also chronicled in The New Hacker's Dictionary is the Crunchly saga, a cartoon series created by The Great Quux (Guy Steele) in the 1970's . Anyone involved with computers in the 1990's will find this book invaluable, whether it is used to study electronic culture, decipher a programmer's utterances, fortify one's language with current terms, or for a good laugh . In its low-cost paperback format, I have no reservations about highly recommending this book to all. Anyone remotely involved with computers will informative, find The New Hacker's Dictionary thought-provoking, and funny-all at the same time.

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