Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary
By, Torvalds, Linus and Diamond, David
Publisher: Texere
Class No.: 005.1092 TOR
Accession No.: 011278
Year: 2001
Pages: 262 p.

Of the week: 22nd May. to 27th May., 2006

A good story is always a good read, and the best story of a whole generation might be the story of Linus Torvalds. Linus and co-author David Diamond share a bit of the Linus story in the autobiography Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. You’ll learn where he is now, where he came from, and how his ragtag movement put a chokehold on Microsoft when so many armies had failed. If you’re looking for insights into the creator of the Linux operating system, you’ll find plenty in this pleasant and accessible tour of his life. If you’re looking for a detailed and methodical treatise on the evolution of Linux, though, you won’t find it in this book; the authors make it clear from the beginning that this isn’t a book about Linux -- it’s a book about Linus.

The autobiography of a career computer programmer, even an unorthodox one, may sound less than enthralling, but this breezy account of the life of Linux inventor Torvalds not only lives up to its insouciant title, it provides an incisive look into the still-raging debate over open source code. In his own words (interspersed with co-writer Diamond's tongue-in-cheek accounts of his interviews with the absentminded Torvalds), the programmer relates how it all started in 1981 with his grandfather back in Finland, who let him play around on a Vic 20 computer. At 11 years old, Torvalds was hooked on computers especially on figuring out how they ran and on improving their operating systems.