Hacker demigod Richard Stallman believes the title story of this book "expresses the spirit of hacking best". This may well be true; it's certainly difficult to recall a better job. The other stories in this collection are also fine work by an author who is perhaps one of today's very best practitioners of hard SF.
:Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier:
Katie Hafner & John Markoff
Simon & Schuster 1991
ISBN 0-671-68322-5
This book gathers narratives about the careers of three notorious crackers into a clear-eyed but sympathetic portrait of hackerdom's dark side. The principals are Kevin Mitnick, "Pengo" and "Hagbard" of the Chaos Computer Club, and Robert T. Morris (see {RTM}, sense 2) . Markoff and Hafner focus as much on their psychologies and motivations as on the details of their exploits, but don't slight the latter. The result is a balanced and fascinating account, particularly useful when read immediately before or after Cliff Stoll's {The Cuckoo's Egg}. It is especially instructive to compare RTM, a true hacker who blundered, with the sociopathic phone-freak Mitnick and the alienated, drug-addled crackers who made the Chaos Club notorious. The gulf between {wizard} and {wannabee} has seldom been made more obvious.
:Technobabble:
John Barry
MIT Press 1991
ISBN 0-262-02333-4
Barry's book takes a critical and humorous look at the `technobabble' of acronyms, neologisms, hyperbole, and metaphor spawned by the computer industry. Though he discusses some of the same mechanisms of jargon formation that occur in hackish, most of what he chronicles is actually suit-speak —- the obfuscatory language of press releases, marketroids, and Silicon Valley CEOs rather than the playful jargon of hackers (most of whom wouldn't be caught dead uttering the kind of pompous, passive-voiced word salad he deplores).
:The Cuckoo's Egg:
Clifford Stoll
Doubleday 1989
ISBN 0-385-24946-2
Clifford Stoll's absorbing tale of how he tracked Markus Hess and the Chaos Club cracking ring nicely illustrates the difference between `hacker' and `cracker'. Stoll's portrait of himself, his lady Martha, and his friends at Berkeley and on the Internet paints a marvelously vivid picture of how hackers and the people around them like to live and what they think.