Ashwin reviewed Just for fun by Linus Torvalds
Review of 'Just for fun' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
The book which shares authoring credits of Linus Torvalds and reporter David Diamond is about the life of Linus and Linux. The writing is mostly by Linus in first person with some intermediate chapters by David Diamond to give sort of an outsider's view of Linus' life.
The book is mainly in 3 parts: Birth of a nerd, Birth of an operating system and King of the ball. I loved reading the first two parts where Linus talks about Finland, early life with his family, introduction to computers, birth of Linux at university, his lovelife(!), move to Transmeta and growth in popularity of Linux upto the time of the book's writing. The third part is where he gives his opinions about more serious stuff like IP, open source software and even delivers the Meaning Of Life! These are the chapters where he appears confused and ambiguous, almost like he was …
The book which shares authoring credits of Linus Torvalds and reporter David Diamond is about the life of Linus and Linux. The writing is mostly by Linus in first person with some intermediate chapters by David Diamond to give sort of an outsider's view of Linus' life.
The book is mainly in 3 parts: Birth of a nerd, Birth of an operating system and King of the ball. I loved reading the first two parts where Linus talks about Finland, early life with his family, introduction to computers, birth of Linux at university, his lovelife(!), move to Transmeta and growth in popularity of Linux upto the time of the book's writing. The third part is where he gives his opinions about more serious stuff like IP, open source software and even delivers the Meaning Of Life! These are the chapters where he appears confused and ambiguous, almost like he was asked by the publishers to write something serious since he has really fooled around in the former parts.
Like the title, the book was fun to read. Linus's writing is full of analogies and many times self-deprecating. Thankfully for the non-tech readers he stops at the right point when delving into the technical details of operating systems, kernels etc. He comes across as someone who does something firstly because it is fun. Everything else is secondary. This applies to Linux too. That is the reason why he stays away from the GNU/Stallman/OSS politics. The book was written at the end of 2000, so not everything about Linux is right now as rosy at it is in the book (like Linux IPOs). After having read about the OS and the hacker behind it from a gazillion outside sources, it was still fun to get it all from the man himself.