Book details of 'Hackers'

Title	Hackers
Author(s)	David Bischoff
ISBN	0061063754
Language	English
Published	September 1995
Publisher	Harper Mass Market Paperbacks

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Back to shelf Computer history/fun
Amazon.com info for Hackers

Score:

virtualbookcase.com score: 5.0   Vote for this book

The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'Hackers':

Reviewer Koos van den Hout wrote:
Based on the movie 'Hackers' this is the novelization of the screenplay. The movie tries to find itself between popularisation and showing how things are and how people feel, so the book does the same. More of a light read then a seriously good book.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
In the beginning was the movie, and then they decided to make a book out of it. The plot line is the usual hacker-meets-girl,-girl-turns-out-to-be-hacker,- girl-gets-hacker fantasy that never happens in real life because real hackers would get distracted by an interesting challenge somewhere between events one and two. The transition from film to book has not been an easy one for this work, and you can almost see the calls from jump-cuts from the original screenplay. Characterization and development are minimal: the "bad guys" are the usual evil big government and big corporation, although the heavies seem more like victims, and the real trouble all seems to come from one thoroughly nasty techie, who still manages to get away with the loot, scot free. The target audience is fairly easy to determine. As far as technical background goes, the film/book is replete with graphical messages sent to text terminals, viruses that carry lengthy audio and video data, worms that subvert accounting systems rather than replicating, and a salami scam. (Has *anyone* got *any* evidence that a salami scam *ever* happened?) There is the usual conflation of crackers, phone phreaks and virus writers together, the assertion that an elementary school student with a weird pseudonym wrote the Internet Worm, and a "Da Vinci" virus. The intriguing fact about the book is that valid and quality background information must have been available to the authors. The book starts with a quote from "The New Hacker's Dictionary" (see reviews) explaining why "hacker" is the wrong title for this work. The number of sites hit by the Internet Worm is closer than that usually given in news reports and the "greater than/less than" reversal bug is referred to. Examples of data base entry errors (and the consequences) have been pulled from the archives of the RISKS-FORUM Digest. And then they go and disassemble a fragment of object code from an unknown computer ... copyright Robert M. Slade, 1996
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