|
Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents
 |
Author: Ellen Ullman, Ellen Ullmann
List Price: $12.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0872863328
Publisher: City Lights Books (November, 1997)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 14,118
Average Customer Rating: 3.62 out of 5
|
Customer ReviewsRating: 2 out of 5
Tedious, boring and insulting.
There is really nothing to this book. When I finally finished it I was like "That was it?" Aside from the lack of any kind of interesting or engaging plot I found the very stereotypical charicterizations of programmers to be insulting. I get the feeling that the author is one of those "non-geek" programmers who (incorrectly) thinks that she understands true geek culture and secretly thinks she is better than the geeks.
Rating: 4 out of 5
An intimate "The Soul of a New Machine"
Ellen Ullmann has created a wonderful novel about the awkward interfaces between programmers and users, programming and aging, and technology and humanity. The first chapter's description of the addiction on shared mind during small team development is a wonder.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Some pros, but mostly cons
Ellen Ullman is obviously an adept coder and is able to describe both the great highs and great lows of being "close to the machine". However, as an actual author, she's a bit tedious and occasionally eye-rollingly vapid: her surprisingly generic sex scenes seem like quick masturbatory breaks, almost as if she felt the need to remind us that "programmers have sex lives, too". And she shows some occasional touches of her own techno-fear, especially when disparaging the nomenclature on a web-browser's interface (she pooh-poohs the usage of "home" on the browser, apparenly forgetting that "home" has also been the traditional name for users' directories on UNIX systems). Probably a good head-nodding read for legacy techies, the post-web generation will most likely sigh "Oh, get OVER yourself" a few times before flinging this one across the room and going back to reading WIRED.
Similar Products
· Codebreaker
· The Bug
|
