Reddit reviews The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary

I can't speak of a specific book that is a comprehensive history of computing, but I will speak to books that speak of our culture, our myths, and our hero's.

Hackers and Painters, by Paul Graham. People are polarized about the man, whether he's too "pie in the sky" - full of shit and ego, or if he speaks as an ambassador to our most optimistic ideals of our (comp-sci) culture. The contents of this book is a collection of his essays that are inspirational. It made me forego the societal pressures within our culture and reject popular opinion because it is merely popular and just an opinion, which is a virtue no matter who you are, where you are, or what you do. All these essays are on his website, though. If you want to review them, I recommend Hackers and Painters (the essay), What You Can't Say, Why Nerds are Unpopular, and The Age of the Essay; his oldest essays are at the bottom of the page and go up - he writes about what he's thinking about or working on at the time, so you'll see the subject matter change over time. So much of this will have direct application to his middle school and high school life. I cannot recommend this book, and the rest of his essays, enough.

If he wants to get into programming, I recommend The Pragmatic Programmer. This book talks about the software development process. I'm not going to lie, I don't know when best to introduce this book to him. It's not a hard read whatsoever, but it's abstract. I read it in college in my first months and said, "Ok," and put it down. Approaching the end of college and my first couple years in my profession, I would reread it ever 6 months. It's a kind of book that doesn't mean anything, really, without experience, without having to live it, when he has an obligation to his craft, his profession. I tell you about this one since you're asking about books to tell him, because this isn't something someone would normally come up across without being told about it.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar is a telling book about the cultural differences between the proprietary monoliths like Apple and Microsoft, and the Free and Open Source Software communities that back such popular software as Linux (the most popular operating system on the planet, running on all top 500 super computers, most server computers on the internet, and all Android phones) and Chrome(the worlds most popular web browser). Indeed, this book directly reflects the huge cultural battle that was duked out in the field, in the industry, and in the courts from the mid-90s and into the 2000s. It advocates helping the community, contributing to something larger than yourself, and that none of us are as good as all of us. To paraphrase Linus Torvalds(inventor of Linux) "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

It's important to know who the hero's are in our culture, and they are diverse and varied, they're not just computer scientists, but mathematicians, physicists, philosophers, science fiction writers, and more. I would find a good book on Nicola Tesla, since he invented basically everything anyway (Thomas Edison was a great businessman, but a bit of a tosser), Richard Feynman was a physicist who is still celebrated in his field, and he even worked for Thinking Machines, back in the day, which was a marvel of it's time. Seymour Cray founded Cray Supercomputers and they have a lasting legacy in the field, a biography on that would be interesting. A biography on Symbolics and their Lisp Machines will make him yearn to find one still functioning (a rare gem that crops up every now and again, though he can run one in an emulator), and about the "AI Winter", a significant historic era (note: the AI Winter is over, and we are in spring, the history is both compelling and enthralling). Anything Issac Asimov published (in nearly every category of the dewy decimal system) is also compelling, and hardly dated. In fact, he's the originator of a lot of modern sci-fi. Charles Babbage invented the modern computer (though it was entirely mechanical in his day, and it wasn't actually built until 1996-2002) and Ada Lovelace was the worlds first computer programmer. A woman! Speaking of women, and it's worth young men learning this about our history, Grace Hopper was a military computer engineer who invented the term "bug".

And speaking of women, someone I have respect for, especially if your boy wants to get into game development is Sheri Graner Ray's Gender Inclusive Game Design, which may be more appropriate when he's in high school, and I consider it required reading for anyone who wants to enter the gaming industry. The book lays out plainly how video games hyper-sexualize both women, and, for some reason surprisingly to many - men, it's disastrous effects it has for the game industry, the game market, and the gaming community, and insights on how we may combat it. I have seen colleagues (men) become indignant and personally offended at reading this book, but were absolutely humbled when they took the fight to Sheri directly (we had a few phone interviews with her, always fantastic). If your boy found a problem with this book, he would do well to read Paul Grahams essay on keeping his identity small... The subject matter is not a personal attack on the individual, but on the blight, and he would be better served finding himself on the right side of history with this one, it would serve him well if he were to pursue this craft, specifically, but also any forward facing media in general.

And I also recommend some good books on math. Algebra, linear algebra, calculus, and statistics. You can get very far, lead an entire career unto retirement without knowing anything more than arithmetic and basic, basic algebra, but he could only serve himself well if he makes the decision that he is going to like maths and chooses to willfully become good at it. Outside the context of school and terrible teachers, it's actually an enthralling subject. Just get him a copy of Flatland, Flatterland, and Sphereland. Try this. There are books about proofs that break them down into laymen terms so that anyone can celebrate how special they are. My wife has a few on the shelf and I can't remember their titles off hand. Also this, the book is the narrative of some witty laymen who discover a whole branch of mathematics from first principles, the surreal numbers, an extension of imaginary numbers. It's really quite good, but might keep him occupied for a couple years in high school.

I should stop here or I never will.

I suggest reading the Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S Raymond.

The Cathedral & the Bazaar

What I was thinking recently was to ask/suggest forming a board/forum where everyone can discuss these issues.

I am a developer, and as you may know a lot of software is open sourced. Apache project for example has created a multitude of products made by volunteer contributions. Valve corporation internally is organized as anarcho-syndicalism (You may recognize the author of this blog, Yanis Varoufakis, a current Finance Minister of Greece (newly elected left-wing government party)). A lot of books that talk about openness, and sharing of ideas have been turned into software books, like The Cathedral and the Bazaar. A lot of software projects breathe anarchy.

My point is software developers have a great open platforms where everyone can make projects, submit issues and form discussions. For example the Github is such a platform.

Without going into long detail, my suggestion was going to be making a project on Github that is well-organized and supported by anarchist community. It would consist of main points of how/what can/should be done in plain, Simple English.

This will make it highly accessible, easy-to-replicate (In software terms "forking" - on github you can easily copy the project for yourself, store it on any number of computers that you have, all done securely).

Inside it can give key insights/ideas of anarchists that are easily to modify and submit new/alternative strategies for each entry. Like you can even make pages about "revolution" and steps that are necessary/advised for people to take.

Of course it takes a little time to get used to using this platform, but we can even take it step further and create something even simpler out of it.
I don't know how many developers are on this subreddit, but even a small number is enough to keep track of this project.
I think it can be a very successful endeavour. Comments/Questions/Suggestions?

"The art of Unix Programming" by Eric S. Raymond. Not as intimidating or outdated as you might think - This book goes over the history and philosophical concepts behind not only Unix (and Linux), but also the Open Source initiative behind Linux. ESR's other work is "The Cathedral & the Bazaar" which is also worth a look, but I would argue is dated now, as much of what was suggested in this book has already come to pass with too many real world examples to mention.

I noticed it was online, is there a place where I can get a tangible copy?

Is this the one?