The Cathedral & the Bazaar

Appendix A. How to Become a Hacker

Why This Document?

As editor of the Jargon File, http://www.tuxedo.org/jargon, and author of a few other well-known documents of similar nature, I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies asking (in effect) “how can I learn to be a wizard hacker?”. Oddly enough there don’t seem to be any FAQs or web documents that address this vital question, so here’s mine.

If you are reading a snapshot of this document offline, the current version lives at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html.

Note: there is a list of Frequently Asked Questions at the end of this document Frequently Asked Questions. Please read these—twice—before mailing me any questions about this document.

What Is a Hacker?

The Jargon File, http://www.tuxedo.org/jargon, 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 ...