In the Beginning...Was the Command Line - Softcover

Stephenson, Neal

3.81

7,982 ratings by Goodreads

9780380815937: In the Beginning...Was the Command Line

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0380815931 ISBN 13: 9780380815937

Publisher: Avon Books, 1999

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

This is "the Word" -- one man's word, certainly -- about the art (and artifice) of the state of our computer-centric existence. And considering that the "one man" is Neal Stephenson, "the hacker Hemingway" (Newsweek) -- acclaimed novelist, pragmatist, seer, nerd-friendly philosopher, and nationally bestselling author of groundbreaking literary works (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, etc., etc.) -- the word is well worth hearing. Mostly well-reasoned examination and partial rant, Stephenson's In the Beginning... was the Command Line is a thoughtful, irreverent, hilarious treatise on the cyber-culture past and present; on operating system tyrannies and downloaded popular revolutions; on the Internet, Disney World, Big Bangs, not to mention the meaning of life itself.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

You may well ask what light cyberpunk maestro Neal Stephenson can shed on the subject of operating systems and interface design. He's better known for his novels: Snow Crash, a dystopian not-too-distant future of avatars, linguistic software viruses and rent-a-nukes; The Diamond Age in which Victorian values come a cropper of nanotechnology; and Cryptonomicon, his 900 page opus spanning the development of hacking from before Bletchley Park to a contemporary data haven in Southeast Asia, complete with an (imaginary, obviously) gay love scene in the woods outside New Haven involving cryptography pioneer Alan Turing.

No one could read a Stephenson novel and not recognise his frighteningly powerful grasp of social and political history, and of technology that underpins all his stories. Read the liner notes on Snow Crash and you'll realise this is a man who probably considers Apple's Human Interface Guidelines to be soothing bedtime reading.

In the Beginning...Was the Command Line gives Stephenson an opportunity to flex his own non-fictional muscles. Part memoir, part developer's history of operating systems, it trawls through CLIs (command line interfaces) such as MS-DOS to GUIs (graphical user interfaces), the then-as now--revolutionary Macintosh OS, and everything since: Windows 98 (note: purist Stephenson doesn't even consider this an OS), Unix and Linux.

By the end of his enlightening, exhaustive elucidation of these and other TLAs, you too may suffer the subject of one of the book's final chapters: "geek fatigue". Not to worry--if there's one thing of which you can be certain it's that Stephenson never takes himself, or his subject, too seriously, and anything that cites Dilbert cartoons and H. G. Wells as source material has got to be a giant step forward. --Liz Bailey

Review:

"A powerful voice of the cyber age."--"USA Today"Stephenson is a literary visionary of the technological future."--"Seattle Weekly"In the network world of the silicon samurai Stephenson is a big-time."--"Cleveland Plain Dealer

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

PublisherAvon Books
Publication date1999
ISBN 10 0380815931
ISBN 13 9780380815937
BindingPaperback
Number of pages151
Rating
- 3.81
  
  7,982 ratings by Goodreads

Buy New

Learn more about this copy

� 11.44

Convert currency

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.

Destination, rates & speeds

Add to Basket

Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace

Seller Image

In the Beginning.was the Command Line by Stephenson, Neal [Paperback ]

Stephenson, Neal

Published by William Morrow Paperbacks (1999)

ISBN 10: 0380815931 ISBN 13: 9780380815937

New Soft Cover Quantity: 10

Seller:

booksXpress
(Bayonne, NJ, U.S.A.)

Rating

Seller Rating:

Book Description Soft Cover. Condition: new. Seller Inventory # 9780380815937

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New

� 11.44

Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE

Within U.S.A.

Destination, rates & speeds

Seller Image