The title is awful, the book is great. Ejovi Nuwere really does get himself out of a dangerous early life in Bed Stuy to a successful computing career by hacking. It's a combination of luck and Nuwere's amazing drive to learn about the world around him. In many ways, this book is a monument to real education and the value of community, wherever you find it.

His picture of early life in Bed Stuy is probably common to other memoirs like this, but it's still very well drawn. It isn't all bad to be a poor kid in a ghetto. It's just dangerous, but that is how kids learn about things. If it wasn't for his grandmother and some of the members of his family, I don't think he would have made it either.

The discussion of hacking and why it mattered at that particular point in the history of computing is rivetting. In a sense, hacking was much more than the usual way of getting out of a ghetto by being a great hip hop artist or athlete, because it simply didn't matter to hackers what the race, class, gender or age of a person was. It mattered what you knew about hacking. That's the purest form of education, and it's worth thinking about that. ( )