Mr. Sk8Bryan15

How To Become A Hacker

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

How To Become A Hacker
Eric Steven Raymond
Thyrsus Enterprises



Copyright © 2001 Eric S. Raymond

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How To Become A Hacker

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

Table of Contents Why This Document? What Is a Hacker? The Hacker Attitude 1. The world is full offascinating 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. 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, learnit. 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 The Hacker/Nerd Connection Points For Style Other Resources Frequently Asked Questions

Why This Document?
As editor of the Jargon File and author of a few other well-known documentsof similar nature, I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies asking (in effect) "how can I learn to be a wizardly hacker?". Back in 1996 I noticed that there didn't seem to be any other FAQs or web documents that addressed this vital question, so I started this one. A lot of hackers now consider it definitive, and I suppose that means it is. Still, I don't claim to be theexclusive authority on this topic; if you don't like what you read here, write your own.

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If you are reading a snapshot of this document offline, the current version lives at http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html. Note: there is a list of Frequently Asked Questions at the end of thisdocument. Please read these—twice—before mailing me any questions about this document. Numerous translations of this document are available: Arabic Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, German, Greek Hebrew, Italian Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Romanian Russian Spanish, Turkish, and Swedish. Note that since this document changesoccasionally, they may be out of date to varying degrees. The five-dots-in-nine-squares diagram that decorates this document is called a glider. It is a simple pattern with some surprising properties in a mathematical simulation called Life that has fascinated hackers for many years. I think it makes a good visual emblem for what hackers are like — abstract, at first a bit mysterious-seeming, but agateway to a whole world with an intricate logic of its own. Read more about the glider emblem here.

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 sharedculture, 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 ofthis 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...