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Ask HN: What are the books to learn the hacker culture?

26 points by inp ↗ HN
What are the books to learn the hacker culture? What is the best for you?

I know there is "Hacking: The Art of Exploitation" by Jon Erickson but the last edition was in 2008.

17 comments

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veddox
To understand the hacker culture, you must understand its background and history. Here are some good books:

"The Jargon File", Eric S. Raymond (ed.) http://www.catb.org/jargon/

"The Cuckoo's Egg", Cliff Stoll

"Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution", Steven Levy

"Where Wizards Stay up Late", Katie Hafner

decasteve
I'd also suggest "the innovators", Walter Isaacson, on top of those.
dasmoth
I’d add “The Soul of a New Machine” by Tracy Kidder.
inp
Great! Thank you for all these references.
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matt_the_bass
I’d suggest listening to the Sex Pistols and Operation Ivy.

Yes that’s punk music. I think the cusltures are similar and have similar ideological roots.

Maybe you’re asking about hacker skills. Of course punk music won’t teach you hacking skills.

inp
Yes, it's not hacker skills but thank you for the hacker culture.
[dead] hjjiehebebe
Something about heavy metal and coding close to the metal!

And being hell banned.

muzani
Kevin Mitnick's "The Art of Deception" comes to mind. While it's more the black hat type, it's a good look at social engineering from the perspective of an expert. I'm always intrigued at how a lot of hackers start with an interest in magic tricks.
hulkisdumb
The hacker culture itself is just a movement that embodies the principles one would naturally grow once one fully immerses oneself in an intellectual pursuit such as computer programming, model train hacking, math, lock-picking etc. Hence you don't 'have' to learn the culture from some damn book
veddox
Cultures are complex things; encompassing, amongst others, habits of thought, a common vocabulary, shared values, a sense of group history, and so on. The hacker culture is indeed quite heavily defined by its ways of thinking and shared values, which don't need to be learned from "some damn book". However, all the other aspects that together constitute a culture do need to be picked up from other members of said culture - and with a culture as distributed as hackerdom, that would indeed be best done by reading books.