We’ll begin by clearing up a common misunderstanding. Did you ever wonder what the difference is between the Internet and the World Wide Web? Many people believe that the two terms can be used interchangeably. In actuality, nothing could be further from the truth.

The Internet is a worldwide network of computer networks. It was dreamed up in 1969 by a U.S. government agency called ARPA, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency. (In fact, the Internet’s original name was ARPANET.) Nowadays, you can access the Internet via telephone lines, cable, fiber optics, and other communication mediums.

The Internet: A worldwide network of computer networks

The World Wide Web is younger still. It came into being around 1990, when researchers realized that they could use the Internet to connect a web of stored hypertext pages and make them accessible to people around the world. That web of pages grew from a handful at the outset to billions today.

The World Wide Web is, by far, the most commonly used application on the Internet. (E-mail is another application of the Internet that you’re familiar with.)

All users of the Web utilize HTTP, or the hypertext transfer protocol, in order to navigate from one Web site to another. Look at the address bar near the top of your Web browser. You’ll find that the www is preceded by http://. This tells the Web site that you’re on the World Wide Web and that you’re using the hypertext transfer protocol.

It’s important to understand the difference between the Internet and the Web so you can fully grasp how search engines work. While search engines use the Internet, they don’t search the entire Internet. Typically, search engines only search for Web sites on the World Wide Web.

The Search Engine Power Players, Yesterday and Today

For a young industry, the search engine field already has quite a past! Here’s a quick summary of important points on the search engine timeline. If you’re a real history buff, you’ll find more details in the FAQs for this lesson.

1993: The first widely acclaimed search engine, the World Wide Web Wanderer, appears. Created to measure the growth of the Web, it performs its job through 1997. The statistics compiled by this search engine are still available on the Web today.

1994: WebCrawler comes on the scene. The original WebCrawler database contains just 6,000 Web sites. (I think I have more Web sites than that listed in my favorites!) AOL-now there’s a name you probably recognize-purchases WebCrawler in 1995, but sells it just two years later to Excite. Infospace, its current owner, buys WebCrawler when Excite declares bankruptcy.

1994: Another powerhouse, the Lycos search engine, launches with 54,000 indexed documents. The Lycos search engine is still a player today, but it’s changed hands several times. Currently, it’s a subsidiary of the Korean-based Daum Communications Corporation.

1995: AltaVista explodes onto the scene. AltaVista (or AV) is the first search engine to include multilingual search capabilities. After changing hands several times, AltaVista becomes the property of Overture Services. (Overture is owned by Yahoo!, which we’ll discuss a bit later.) AltaVista maintains its status as the search king until the launch of Google.

1998: Larry Page and Sergey Brin introduce the world to Google, which quickly shoots to the top of the search engine rankings. (The name comes from the word googol, which is the name for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.) Google’s database now includes trillions of Web pages, and most experts agree that Google enjoys greater than 50% of total search engine traffic. This means that a top Google ranking will yield more traffic to your site than a top ranking with any other search engine…period.

That’s where things stand now, with Google by far the most used search engine on the Web.

However, things change rapidly, with companies constantly buying, selling, and creating search engines. As a result, you’ll want to keep tabs on which search engines are gaining or losing popularity.

Search Engines versus Directories

Are you wondering why we didn’t talk about Yahoo! in the last section? That’s because Yahoo! began as a directory, not a search engine.

While search engines’ indexes are compiled by computers, directories are categorical lists of Web sites compiled by humans. Before it’s accepted, each Web site listed in a directory is carefully scrutinized and deemed acceptable for placement in one specific category.

Some people argue that because directories are compiled by humans, they’re limited because they don’t offer as many search results as search engines. However, I think you’ll find that the search results displayed by directories can often be much more useful than the search results displayed by search engines.

The most popular directory on the Web is Yahoo!, founded in 1994 by David Filo and Jerry Yang. They started Yahoo! on a couple of computers in a campus trailer at Stanford, initially using it to track their own interests. It surprised them by taking off quickly, and they incorporated it in 1995 with an initial investment of almost $2 million. By the way, Yahoo! Is an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle-but I promise not to test you on that!

In an effort to diversify, Yahoo decided to use Google’s engine to supply users with primary search results. However, in 2004, Yahoo! unveiled its own brand-new search engine.

You can still tap into Yahoo!’s directory, and I think you’ll find it extremely useful at times. If you perform a search at http://www.yahoo.com, the results you’ll get are derived from the Yahoo Search Engine. However, you can obtain Yahoo Directory search results by initiating a search at http://dir.yahoo.com.

The Open Directory Project is perhaps the second most popular directory on the Web. It’s compiled by more than 50,000 volunteers who’ve indexed nearly 4 million Web sites. The directory contains just under 500,000 categories, all of which can be searched by keyword or category.

Due to the limited resources of the Open Directory, searching for results through their Web site can be time-consuming and cumbersome. However, some search engines include Open Directory listings within their secondary search results.

Another addition to the Windows 7 taskbar is the jumplist. A jumplist is a personalized menu that may offer access to the program’s functions or recently/frequently used files. Since i’m talking about personalized menus, their content is, of course, decided by each application’s developer and will consequently vary. For example, while the Windows Explorer jumplist displays a list of frequently and recently accessed locations, the Internet Explorer jumplist will display your browser’s history.

As for new stylish elements in this operating system, I should mention that most progress bars will now be viewable from the taskbar, so you won’t need to focus on a window just to find out how much progress has been made. You will notice another eye-catching feature when hovering over the taskbar icon of an opened application – the lightning effect that highlights the pointer’s position.

Naturally, the taskbar and Start Menu properties haven’t been left unchanged either. Improvements have been made especially to the Start Menu options, which now allow you to customize it in a manner that, had it been available in previous Windows operating systems, it could have been achieved only through registry tweaks.

What’s in and what’s out

Fans of Windows Movie Maker will probably be surprised to find out that this component, along with Windows Mail and Windows Photo Gallery, is no longer bundled in Windows 7. Don’t worry, you can always download them from Windows Live.

Of course, Microsoft couldn’t have removed applications without adding a few new ones as well. A pretty useful software is Windows DVD Maker that allows you to create your very own multimedia DVD. Although the program is easy to use and offers a straightforward procedure for burning your video, music and graphic files to a DVD, it also enables you to customize various DVD settings, such as its menu, video format or DVD aspect ratio.

There are also a few other, smaller, additions like the Sticky Notes, Snipping Tool, and even a long awaited Disc Image Burning Tool. Unfortunately, none of these utilities is advanced, but if you’re looking for some basic operations, they are surely the handiest solution.

Changes in Windows programs

The basic changes that you can easily discover by just browsing for a few minutes are as follows. Wordpad and Paint have been enhanced a bit, in that they now employ the ribbon interface. You’ll be using the beta version of Internet Explorer 8 and a not-yet-released for download version 12 of Windows Media Player. Windows Calculator now features Programmer and Statistics modes, and includes date calculation and unit conversion functionality as well.

Windows Search functions on a much more improved engine, as compared to the one available at this moment in/for Vista. A less important optimization, but still worth mentioning, is the ability to resize the length of the search bar in Windows Explorer.
Last but not least in our list of changes that would probably interest any average user are the Control Panel additions. You’ll notice a few new items: ClearType Text Tuner, Credential Manager, Display Color Calibration Wizard, Gadgets, Location and Other Sensors, Recovery, System Icons, Troubleshooting, Workspaces Center, Biometric Devices, Windows Solution Center.

Windows Solution Center is the replacement of the Windows Security Center currently available in Windows Vista and XP. It will now provide access to the system’s security components (virus, network access and spyware protection, firewall, UAC, automatic updates, etc.), but also to maintenance tasks such as Windows Backup, System Restore or Troubleshooting.

Conclusion

After my quick tour in Windows 7, I find myself very enthusiastic about it. Unfortunately, there is always a “but” that follows this type of statements. Windows 7 improves or introduces cool, new features like jumplists and thumbnails, but you won’t be able to fully enjoy them on non-native Windows 7 applications. Don’t expect the tab trick to work on the current version of Firefox or Maxthon and, sadly, the same goes for the play control of Winamp, for example. Not yet, at least.

Homegroups are a great way to share files, but please remember they are a Windows 7 feature, so you won’t be able to use them with your friends and colleagues using Vista or XP.

Last but not least in our list of changes that would probably interest any average user are the Control Panel additions. You’ll notice a few new items: ClearType Text Tuner, Credential Manager, Display Color Calibration Wizard, Gadgets, Location and Other Sensors, Recovery, System Icons, Troubleshooting, Workspaces Center, Biometric Devices, Windows Solution Center.

Windows Solution Center is the replacement of the Windows Security Center currently available in Windows Vista and XP. It will now provide access to the system’s security components (virus, network access and spyware protection, firewall, UAC, automatic updates, etc.), but also to maintenance tasks such as Windows Backup, System Restore or Troubleshooting.

WINDOWS 7:worth installing?? (ch-1)
WINDOWS 7:worth installing?? (ch-2)

Installation

As a starting note, i should state that Windows 7 was installed on a Vista-compatible laptop, and, therefore, performance was not an issue. As for the installation process, it lasted approximately 25 minutes and was almost identical to the one found in Windows Vista. You must have noticed that I said “almost.” The addition of homegroups is a difference between the two operating systems that you will surely notice even during the installation process – at the end of it, you will receive a password that will later allow you to access this facility.


Getting started

When the setup process was finished, I headed to the Getting started window to see the new functionalities in Windows that I should be concentrating on. Since i’m talking about a beta version, this didn’t turn out to be a very wise decision: the What’s New headlines were missing. Instead, Item 1, Item 2 and Item 3 were displayed. Still, included in this window is a See more new features button that leads to the section in Windows Help with all the new features I was looking for: Specialized for laptops, Optimized for entertainment, Designed for services, etc.

Highlights

Specialized for laptops, unfortunately, does not mean in any way that, by installing Windows 7 on a laptop, you’ll be able to use it a lot longer by running just on your battery. The power consumption is, at best, the same as in Windows Vista. However, Windows 7 does include more advanced power options and power plans that might help you squeeze just a little bit more juice out of your battery.
In this version of Microsoft Windows, Media Player finally has its own sets of codecs, which will allow you to view videos, movies and clips without having to search the Internet for codec packs. Furthermore, Windows Media Center has been “pimped” to ensure that Windows 7 really is optimized for entertainment. The downside in this case is that, during my testing of Windows Media Player, the application froze repeatedly and, to cap it all off, so did the entire system with it (thus forcing the user to reboot in order to get back control).

I think it’s safe to say that designing Windows 7 for services most probably brought the coolest new concepts in looks and maneuverability of windows. Therefore, in order to make this operating system from a touch screen extremely easy to use, several new, interesting and very useful features have been implemented. Aside from the Superbar you’ve probably heard of – that, in a way, uses the concept of mac docks – another addition, which, although potentially useful to the average user, I doubt was designed especially for them, is the “shake” functionality that allows them to minimize all windows behind a window that is shaken a bit using its title bar.

Last but not least, you’ll be able to maximize a window by just dragging it to the top of the screen, or to resize its width to the width of the screen by either dragging its title bar to the right/left edge of the screen, or the resize arrows to the top/bottom of the screen. As a side note, similar actions have been assigned through the usage of the Windows and directional keys: Windows Key + Up = Maximize, Windows Key + Down = Minimize, Windows Key + Left = The window will occupy the entire left side of the screen, Windows Key + Right = The window will occupy the entire right side of the screen.
Start Menu and Taskbar
Since i’m talking about useful changes brought to the operating system’s look, I must also mention the improved tray. First of all, to the right of the clock, you can now observe a new button that will show/hide the desktop (so, no, you won’t be needing the quicklaunch shortcut anymore). Secondly, the possibility to change icon order has finally been implemented. And thirdly, all third-party/ irrelevant/ unused icons will no longer occupy most of the space in your tray: all of them can be accessed with just one click on a small arrow to the left of the tray area.

As you might have heard already, the Superbar isn’t the only major change brought to the Windows 7 taskbar. You can now finally change the order of your windows in the taskbar. Furthermore, the thumbnails have been considerably tweaked, and they no longer function as a small, singular preview of an application.

Windows 7 will now display a thumbnail for each window of a group, and from each thumbnail, users can close the corresponding window or, in some cases, access its common controls, like Play, Previous, or Next in the case of Windows Media Player. Another example of how the thumbnails have been improved is the possibility to view the tabs of an application as if they were separate windows just by hovering over its taskbar icon with your mouse. Naturally, the thumbnail will also function as a preview to a specific window, so you won’t necessarily need to switch windows in order to just take a quick peek at another program – for instance, hovering over the thumbnail will do the trick instead.

contd…
WINDOWS 7:worth installing?? (ch-1)
WINDOWS 7:worth installing?? (ch-2)

Table of contents

Points For Style

Other Resources

Frequently Asked Questions

The Hacker/Nerd Connection

Contrary to popular myth, you don’t have to be a nerd to be a hacker. It does help, however, and many hackers are in fact nerds. Being something of a social outcast helps you stay concentrated on the really important things, like thinking and hacking.

For this reason, many hackers have adopted the label ‘geek’ as a badge of pride — it’s a way of declaring their independence from normal social expectations (as well as a fondness for other things like science fiction and strategy games that often go with being a hacker). The term ‘nerd’ used to be used this way back in the 1990s, back when ‘nerd’ was a mild pejorative and ‘geek’ a rather harsher one; sometime after 2000 they switched places, at least in U.S. popular culture, and there is now even a significant geek-pride culture among people who aren’t techies.

If you can manage to concentrate enough on hacking to be good at it and still have a life, that’s fine. This is a lot easier today than it was when I was a newbie in the 1970s; mainstream culture is much friendlier to techno-nerds now. There are even growing numbers of people who realize that hackers are often high-quality lover and spouse material.

If you’re attracted to hacking because you don’t have a life, that’s OK too — at least you won’t have trouble concentrating. Maybe you’ll get a life later on.

Points For Style

Again, to be a hacker, you have to enter the hacker mindset. There are some things you can do when you’re not at a computer that seem to help. They’re not substitutes for hacking (nothing is) but many hackers do them, and feel that they connect in some basic way with the essence of hacking.

· Learn to write your native language well. Though it’s a common stereotype that programmers can’t write, a surprising number of hackers (including all the most accomplished ones I know of) are very able writers.

· Read science fiction. Go to science fiction conventions (a good way to meet hackers and proto-hackers).

· Train in a martial-arts form. The kind of mental discipline required for martial arts seems to be similar in important ways to what hackers do. The most popular forms among hackers are definitely Asian empty-hand arts such as Tae Kwon Do, various forms of Karate, Kung Fu, Aikido, or Ju Jitsu. Western fencing and Asian sword arts also have visible followings. In places where it’s legal, pistol shooting has been rising in popularity since the late 1990s. The most hackerly martial arts are those which emphasize mental discipline, relaxed awareness, and control, rather than raw strength, athleticism, or physical toughness.

· Study an actual meditation discipline. The perennial favorite among hackers is Zen (importantly, it is possible to benefit from Zen without acquiring a religion or discarding one you already have). Other styles may work as well, but be careful to choose one that doesn’t require you to believe crazy things.

· Develop an analytical ear for music. Learn to appreciate peculiar kinds of music. Learn to play some musical instrument well, or how to sing.

· Develop your appreciation of puns and wordplay.

The more of these things you already do, the more likely it is that you are natural hacker material. Why these things in particular is not completely clear, but they’re connected with a mix of left- and right-brain skills that seems to be important; hackers need to be able to both reason logically and step outside the apparent logic of a problem at a moment’s notice.

Work as intensely as you play and play as intensely as you work. For true hackers, the boundaries between “play”, “work”, “science” and “art” all tend to disappear, or to merge into a high-level creative playfulness. Also, don’t be content with a narrow range of skills. Though most hackers self-describe as programmers, they are very likely to be more than competent in several related skills — system administration, web design, and PC hardware troubleshooting are common ones. A hacker who’s a system administrator, on the other hand, is likely to be quite skilled at script programming and web design. Hackers don’t do things by halves; if they invest in a skill at all, they tend to get very good at it.

Finally, a few things not to do.

· Don’t use a silly, grandiose user ID or screen name.

· Don’t get in flame wars on Usenet (or anywhere else).

· Don’t call yourself a ‘cyberpunk’, and don’t waste your time on anybody who does.

· Don’t post or email writing that’s full of spelling errors and bad grammar.

The only reputation you’ll make doing any of these things is as a twit. Hackers have long memories — it could take you years to live your early blunders down enough to be accepted.

The problem with screen names or handles deserves some amplification. Concealing your identity behind a handle is a juvenile and silly behavior characteristic of crackers, warez d00dz, and other lower life forms. Hackers don’t do this; they’re proud of what they do and want it associated with their real names. So if you have a handle, drop it. In the hacker culture it will only mark you as a loser.

Other Resources

Paul Graham has written an essay called Great Hackers, and another on Undergraduation, in which he speaks much wisdom.

There is a document called How To Be A Programmer that is an excellent complement to this one. It has valuable advice not just about coding and skillsets, but about how to function on a programming team.

I have also written A Brief History Of Hackerdom.

I have written a paper, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which explains a lot about how the Linux and open-source cultures work. I have addressed this topic even more directly in its sequel Homesteading the Noosphere.

Rick Moen has written an excellent document on how to run a Linux user group.

Rick Moen and I have collaborated on another document on How To Ask Smart Questions. This will help you seek assistance in a way that makes it more likely that you will actually get it.

If you need instruction in the basics of how personal computers, Unix, and the Internet work, see The Unix and Internet Fundamentals HOWTO.

When you release software or write patches for software, try to follow the guidelines in the Software Release Practice HOWTO.

If you enjoyed the Zen poem, you might also like Rootless Root: The Unix Koans of Master Foo.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q:Which are the best hacking tools?

A:Google,Wiki and your brain.

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Table of Contents

Status in the Hacker Culture

1. Write open-source software

2. Help test and debug open-source software

3. Publish useful information

4. Help keep the infrastructure working

5. Serve the hacker culture itself

Like most cultures without a money economy, hackerdom runs on reputation. You’re trying to solve interesting problems, but how interesting they are, and whether your solutions are really good, is something that only your technical peers or superiors are normally equipped to judge.

Accordingly, when you play the hacker game, you learn to keep score primarily by what other hackers think of your skill (this is why you aren’t really a hacker until other hackers consistently call you one). This fact is obscured by the image of hacking as solitary work; also by a hacker-cultural taboo (gradually decaying since the late 1990s but still potent) against admitting that ego or external validation are involved in one’s motivation at all.

Specifically, hackerdom is what anthropologists call a gift culture. You gain status and reputation in it not by dominating other people, nor by being beautiful, nor by having things other people want, but rather by giving things away. Specifically, by giving away your time, your creativity, and the results of your skill.

There are basically five kinds of things you can do to be respected by hackers:

1. Write open-source software

The first (the most central and most traditional) is to write programs that other hackers think are fun or useful, and give the program sources away to the whole hacker culture to use.

(We used to call these works “free software”, but this confused too many people who weren’t sure exactly what “free” was supposed to mean. Most of us now prefer the term “open-source” software).

Hackerdom’s most revered demigods are people who have written large, capable programs that met a widespread need and given them away, so that now everyone uses them.

But there’s a bit of a fine historical point here. While hackers have always looked up to the open-source developers among them as our community’s hardest core, before the mid-1990s most hackers most of the time worked on closed source. This was still true when I wrote the first version of this HOWTO in 1996; it took the mainstreaming of open-source software after 1997 to change things. Today, “the hacker community” and “open-source developers” are two descriptions for what is essentially the same culture and population — but it is worth remembering that this was not always so.

2. Help test and debug open-source software

They also serve who stand and debug open-source software. In this imperfect world, we will inevitably spend most of our software development time in the debugging phase. That’s why any open-source author who’s thinking will tell you that good beta-testers (who know how to describe symptoms clearly, localize problems well, can tolerate bugs in a quickie release, and are willing to apply a few simple diagnostic routines) are worth their weight in rubies. Even one of these can make the difference between a debugging phase that’s a protracted, exhausting nightmare and one that’s merely a salutary nuisance.

If you’re a newbie, try to find a program under development that you’re interested in and be a good beta-tester. There’s a natural progression from helping test programs to helping debug them to helping modify them. You’ll learn a lot this way, and generate good karma with people who will help you later on.

3. Publish useful information

Another good thing is to collect and filter useful and interesting information into web pages or documents like Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) lists, and make those generally available.

Maintainers of major technical FAQs get almost as much respect as open-source authors.

4. Help keep the infrastructure working

The hacker culture (and the engineering development of the Internet, for that matter) is run by volunteers. There’s a lot of necessary but unglamorous work that needs done to keep it going — administering mailing lists, moderating newsgroups, maintaining large software archive sites, developing RFCs and other technical standards.

People who do this sort of thing well get a lot of respect, because everybody knows these jobs are huge time sinks and not as much fun as playing with code. Doing them shows dedication.

5. Serve the hacker culture itself

Finally, you can serve and propagate the culture itself (by, for example, writing an accurate primer on how to become a hacker ). This is not something you’ll be positioned to do until you’ve been around for while and become well-known for one of the first four things.

The hacker culture doesn’t have leaders, exactly, but it does have culture heroes and tribal elders and historians and spokespeople. When you’ve been in the trenches long enough, you may grow into one of these. Beware: hackers distrust blatant ego in their tribal elders, so visibly reaching for this kind of fame is dangerous. Rather than striving for it, you have to sort of position yourself so it drops in your lap, and then be modest and gracious about your status.

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Table of Contents

Basic Hacking Skills

1. Learn how to program.

2. Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to use and run it.

3. Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write HTML.

4. If you don’t have functional English, learn it.

The hacker attitude is vital, but skills are even more vital. Attitude is no substitute for competence, and there’s a certain basic toolkit of skills which you have to have before any hacker will dream of calling you one.

This toolkit changes slowly over time as technology creates new skills and makes old ones obsolete. For example, it used to include programming in machine language, and didn’t until recently involve HTML. But right now it pretty clearly includes the following:

1. Learn how to program.

This, of course, is the fundamental hacking skill. If you don’t know any computer languages, I recommend starting with Python. It is cleanly designed, well documented, and relatively kind to beginners. Despite being a good first language, it is not just a toy; it is very powerful and flexible and well suited for large projects. I have written a more detailed evaluation of Python. Good tutorials are available at the Python web site.

I used to recommend Java as a good language to learn early, but this critique has changed my mind (search for “The Pitfalls of Java as a First Programming Language” within it). A hacker cannot, as they devastatingly put it “approach problem-solving like a plumber in a hardware store”; you have to know what the components actually do. Now I think it is probably best to learn C and Lisp first, then Java.

If you get into serious programming, you will have to learn C, the core language of Unix. C++ is very closely related to C; if you know one, learning the other will not be difficult. Neither language is a good one to try learning as your first, however. And, actually, the more you can avoid programming in C the more productive you will be.

C is very efficient, and very sparing of your machine’s resources. Unfortunately, C gets that efficiency by requiring you to do a lot of low-level management of resources (like memory) by hand. All that low-level code is complex and bug-prone, and will soak up huge amounts of your time on debugging. With today’s machines as powerful as they are, this is usually a bad tradeoff — it’s smarter to use a language that uses the machine’s time less efficiently, but your time much more efficiently. Thus, Python.

Other languages of particular importance to hackers include Perl and LISP. Perl is worth learning for practical reasons; it’s very widely used for active web pages and system administration, so that even if you never write Perl you should learn to read it. Many people use Perl in the way I suggest you should use Python, to avoid C programming on jobs that don’t require C’s machine efficiency. You will need to be able to understand their code.

LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot. (You can get some beginning experience with LISP fairly easily by writing and modifying editing modes for the Emacs text editor, or Script-Fu plugins for the GIMP.)

It’s best, actually, to learn all five of Python, C/C++, Java, Perl, and LISP. Besides being the most important hacking languages, they represent very different approaches to programming, and each will educate you in valuable ways.

But be aware that you won’t reach the skill level of a hacker or even merely a programmer simply by accumulating languages — you need to learn how to think about programming problems in a general way, independent of any one language. To be a real hacker, you need to get to the point where you can learn a new language in days by relating what’s in the manual to what you already know. This means you should learn several very different languages.

I can’t give complete instructions on how to learn to program here — it’s a complex skill. But I can tell you that books and courses won’t do it — many, maybe most of the best hackers are self-taught. You can learn language features — bits of knowledge — from books, but the mind-set that makes that knowledge into living skill can be learned only by practice and apprenticeship. What will do it is (a) reading code and (b) writing code.

Peter Norvig, who is one of Google’s top hackers and the co-author of the most widely used textbook on AI, has written an excellent essay called Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. His “recipe for programming success” is worth careful attention.

Learning to program is like learning to write good natural language. The best way to do it is to read some stuff written by masters of the form, write some things yourself, read a lot more, write a little more, read a lot more, write some more … and repeat until your writing begins to develop the kind of strength and economy you see in your models.

Finding good code to read used to be hard, because there were few large programs available in source for fledgeling hackers to read and tinker with. This has changed dramatically; open-source software, programming tools, and operating systems (all built by hackers) are now widely available. Which brings me neatly to our next topic…

2. Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to use and run it.

I’ll assume you have a personal computer or can get access to one. (Take a moment to appreciate how much that means. The hacker culture originally evolved back when computers were so expensive that individuals could not own them.) The single most important step any newbie can take toward acquiring hacker skills is to get a copy of Linux or one of the BSD-Unixes or OpenSolaris, install it on a personal machine, and run it.

Yes, there are other operating systems in the world besides Unix. But they’re distributed in binary — you can’t read the code, and you can’t modify it. Trying to learn to hack on a Microsoft Windows machine or under any other closed-source system is like trying to learn to dance while wearing a body cast.

Under Mac OS X it’s possible, but only part of the system is open source — you’re likely to hit a lot of walls, and you have to be careful not to develop the bad habit of depending on Apple’s proprietary code. If you concentrate on the Unix under the hood you can learn some useful things.

Unix is the operating system of the Internet. While you can learn to use the Internet without knowing Unix, you can’t be an Internet hacker without understanding Unix. For this reason, the hacker culture today is pretty strongly Unix-centered. (This wasn’t always true, and some old-time hackers still aren’t happy about it, but the symbiosis between Unix and the Internet has become strong enough that even Microsoft’s muscle doesn’t seem able to seriously dent it.)

So, bring up a Unix — I like Linux myself but there are other ways (and yes, you can run both Linux and Microsoft Windows on the same machine). Learn it. Run it. Tinker with it. Talk to the Internet with it. Read the code. Modify the code. You’ll get better programming tools (including C, LISP, Python, and Perl) than any Microsoft operating system can dream of hosting, you’ll have fun, and you’ll soak up more knowledge than you realize you’re learning until you look back on it as a master hacker.

For more about learning Unix, see The Loginataka. You might also want to have a look at The Art Of Unix Programming.

To get your hands on a Linux, see the Linux Online! site; you can download from there or (better idea) find a local Linux user group to help you with installation.

During the first ten years of this HOWTO’s life, I reported that from a new user’s point of view, all Linux distributions are almost equivalent. But in 2006-2007, an actual best choice emerged: Ubuntu. While other distros have their own areas of strength, Ubuntu is far and away the most accessible to Linux newbies.

You can find BSD Unix help and resources at www.bsd.org.

A good way to dip your toes in the water is to boot up what Linux fans call a live CD, a distribution that runs entirely off a CD without having to modify your hard disk. This will be slow, because CDs are slow, but it’s a way to get a look at the possibilities without having to do anything drastic.

I have written a primer on the basics of Unix and the Internet.

I used to recommend against installing either Linux or BSD as a solo project if you’re a newbie. Nowadays the installers have gotten good enough that doing it entirely on your own is possible, even for a newbie. Nevertheless, I still recommend making contact with your local Linux user’s group and asking for help. It can’t hurt, and may smooth the process.

3. Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write HTML.

Most of the things the hacker culture has built do their work out of sight, helping run factories and offices and universities without any obvious impact on how non-hackers live. The Web is the one big exception, the huge shiny hacker toy that even politicians admit has changed the world. For this reason alone (and a lot of other good ones as well) you need to learn how to work the Web.

This doesn’t just mean learning how to drive a browser (anyone can do that), but learning how to write HTML, the Web’s markup language. If you don’t know how to program, writing HTML will teach you some mental habits that will help you learn. So build a home page. Try to stick to XHTML, which is a cleaner language than classic HTML. (There are good beginner tutorials on the Web; here’s one.)

But just having a home page isn’t anywhere near good enough to make you a hacker. The Web is full of home pages. Most of them are pointless, zero-content sludge — very snazzy-looking sludge, mind you, but sludge all the same (for more on this see The HTML Hell Page).

To be worthwhile, your page must have content — it must be interesting and/or useful to other hackers. And that brings us to the next topic…

4. If you don’t have functional English, learn it.

As an American and native English-speaker myself, I have previously been reluctant to suggest this, lest it be taken as a sort of cultural imperialism. But several native speakers of other languages have urged me to point out that English is the working language of the hacker culture and the Internet, and that you will need to know it to function in the hacker community.

Back around 1991 I learned that many hackers who have English as a second language use it in technical discussions even when they share a birth tongue; it was reported to me at the time that English has a richer technical vocabulary than any other language and is therefore simply a better tool for the job. For similar reasons, translations of technical books written in English are often unsatisfactory (when they get done at all).

Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently never occurred to him to do otherwise). His fluency in English has been an important factor in his ability to recruit a worldwide community of developers for Linux. It’s an example worth following.

Being a native English-speaker does not guarantee that you have language skills good enough to function as a hacker. If your writing is semi-literate, ungrammatical, and riddled with misspellings, many hackers (including myself) will tend to ignore you. While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we’ve generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers. If you can’t yet write competently, learn to.

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source:Article written by Sir ESR

Table of Contents

What Is a Hacker?

The Hacker Attitude

1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.

2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.

3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.

4. Freedom is good.

5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.

What Is a Hacker?

The Jargon File contains a bunch of definitions of the term ‘hacker’, most having to do with technical adeptness and a delight in solving problems and overcoming limits. If you want to know how to become a hacker, though, only two are really relevant.

There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The members of this culture originated the term ‘hacker’. Hackers built the Internet. Hackers made the Unix operating system what it is today. Hackers run Usenet. Hackers make the World Wide Web work. If you are part of this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a hacker, you’re a hacker.

The hacker mind-set is not confined to this software-hacker culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music — actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them ‘hackers’ too — and some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in. But in the rest of this document we will focus on the skills and attitudes of software hackers, and the traditions of the shared culture that originated the term ‘hacker’.

There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but aren’t. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people ‘crackers’ and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers mostly think crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very bright, and object that being able to break security doesn’t make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word ‘hacker’ to describe crackers; this irritates real hackers no end.

The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.

If you want to be a hacker, keep reading. If you want to be a cracker, go read the alt.2600 newsgroup and get ready to do five to ten in the slammer after finding out you aren’t as smart as you think you are. And that’s all I’m going to say about crackers.

The Hacker Attitude

1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.

2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.

3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.

4. Freedom is good.

5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.

Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe in freedom and voluntary mutual help. To be accepted as a hacker, you have to behave as though you have this kind of attitude yourself. And to behave as though you have the attitude, you have to really believe the attitude.

But if you think of cultivating hacker attitudes as just a way to gain acceptance in the culture, you’ll miss the point. Becoming the kind of person who believes these things is important for you — for helping you learn and keeping you motivated. As with all creative arts, the most effective way to become a master is to imitate the mind-set of masters — not just intellectually but emotionally as well.

Or, as the following modern Zen poem has it:

To follow the path:
look to the master,
follow the master,
walk with the master,
see through the master,
become the master.

So, if you want to be a hacker, repeat the following things until you believe them:

1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.

Being a hacker is lots of fun, but it’s a kind of fun that takes lots of effort. The effort takes motivation. Successful athletes get their motivation from a kind of physical delight in making their bodies perform, in pushing themselves past their own physical limits. Similarly, to be a hacker you have to get a basic thrill from solving problems, sharpening your skills, and exercising your intelligence.

If you aren’t the kind of person that feels this way naturally, you’ll need to become one in order to make it as a hacker. Otherwise you’ll find your hacking energy is sapped by distractions like sex, money, and social approval.

(You also have to develop a kind of faith in your own learning capacity — a belief that even though you may not know all of what you need to solve a problem, if you tackle just a piece of it and learn from that, you’ll learn enough to solve the next piece — and so on, until you’re done.)

2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.

Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource. They shouldn’t be wasted on re-inventing the wheel when there are so many fascinating new problems waiting out there.

To behave like a hacker, you have to believe that the thinking time of other hackers is precious — so much so that it’s almost a moral duty for you to share information, solve problems and then give the solutions away just so other hackers can solve new problems instead of having to perpetually re-address old ones.

Note, however, that “No problem should ever have to be solved twice.” does not imply that you have to consider all existing solutions sacred, or that there is only one right solution to any given problem. Often, we learn a lot about the problem that we didn’t know before by studying the first cut at a solution. It’s OK, and often necessary, to decide that we can do better. What’s not OK is artificial technical, legal, or institutional barriers (like closed-source code) that prevent a good solution from being re-used and force people to re-invent wheels.

(You don’t have to believe that you’re obligated to give all your creative product away, though the hackers that do are the ones that get most respect from other hackers. It’s consistent with hacker values to sell enough of it to keep you in food and rent and computers. It’s fine to use your hacking skills to support a family or even get rich, as long as you don’t forget your loyalty to your art and your fellow hackers while doing it.)

3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.

Hackers (and creative people in general) should never be bored or have to drudge at stupid repetitive work, because when this happens it means they aren’t doing what only they can do — solve new problems. This wastefulness hurts everybody. Therefore boredom and drudgery are not just unpleasant but actually evil.

To behave like a hacker, you have to believe this enough to want to automate away the boring bits as much as possible, not just for yourself but for everybody else (especially other hackers).

(There is one apparent exception to this. Hackers will sometimes do things that may seem repetitive or boring to an observer as a mind-clearing exercise, or in order to acquire a skill or have some particular kind of experience you can’t have otherwise. But this is by choice — nobody who can think should ever be forced into a situation that bores them.)

4. Freedom is good.

Hackers are naturally anti-authoritarian. Anyone who can give you orders can stop you from solving whatever problem you’re being fascinated by — and, given the way authoritarian minds work, will generally find some appallingly stupid reason to do so. So the authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it, lest it smother you and other hackers.

(This isn’t the same as fighting all authority. Children need to be guided and criminals restrained. A hacker may agree to accept some kinds of authority in order to get something he wants more than the time he spends following orders. But that’s a limited, conscious bargain; the kind of personal surrender authoritarians want is not on offer.)

Authoritarians thrive on censorship and secrecy. And they distrust voluntary cooperation and information-sharing — they only like ‘cooperation’ that they control. So to behave like a hacker, you have to develop an instinctive hostility to censorship, secrecy, and the use of force or deception to compel responsible adults. And you have to be willing to act on that belief.

5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.

To be a hacker, you have to develop some of these attitudes. But copping an attitude alone won’t make you a hacker, any more than it will make you a champion athlete or a rock star. Becoming a hacker will take intelligence, practice, dedication, and hard work.

Therefore, you have to learn to distrust attitude and respect competence of every kind. Hackers won’t let posers waste their time, but they worship competence — especially competence at hacking, but competence at anything is valued. Competence at demanding skills that few can master is especially good, and competence at demanding skills that involve mental acuteness, craft, and concentration is best.

If you revere competence, you’ll enjoy developing it in yourself — the hard work and dedication will become a kind of intense play rather than drudgery. That attitude is vital to becoming a hacker.

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source:Article written by Sir ESR