I stumbled upon the last printed edition of this (ESR's version) at a bookstore in high school. I had dabbled with programming on and off since elementary school (back when that was unusual!), but now I was seriously getting into it.
While almost none of the terms in the book resonated with me as anything I had heard before, I strongly identified with the cultural aspects described in the book. I suddenly felt like my ways of thinking about computing, and about the world in general, were in fact not that strange, but shared by a lot of people who were into programming.
The book introduced me to many things that I went on to become more involved with; at least indirectly due to the book: learned LaTeX, Emacs, and Lisp; studied Knuth, reading carefully until I earned a check; volunteered for GNU, resulting in working directly with RMS.
As a technical resource, the book is close to useless now. But it was mostly useless when I encountered it. Maybe there's still some value left in it somewhere...
While almost none of the terms in the book resonated with me as anything I had heard before, I strongly identified with the cultural aspects described in the book. I suddenly felt like my ways of thinking about computing, and about the world in general, were in fact not that strange, but shared by a lot of people who were into programming.
The book introduced me to many things that I went on to become more involved with; at least indirectly due to the book: learned LaTeX, Emacs, and Lisp; studied Knuth, reading carefully until I earned a check; volunteered for GNU, resulting in working directly with RMS.
As a technical resource, the book is close to useless now. But it was mostly useless when I encountered it. Maybe there's still some value left in it somewhere...