Table of Contents

What Is a Hacker?
The Hacker Attitude
1. The world is full of fascinating 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, learn it.
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
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 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 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
spirits elsewhere and may call them „hackers‟ too — and some
claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular
medium the hacker works in. But in the rest of this document we
will focus on the skills and attitudes of software hackers, and the
traditions of the shared culture that originated the term „hacker‟.

There is another group of people who loudly call themselves

hackers, but aren't. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who
get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone
system. Real hackers call these people „crackers‟ and want nothing
to do with them. Real hackers mostly think crackers are lazy,
irresponsible, and not very bright, and object that being able to
break security doesn't make you a hacker any more than being
able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.
Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into
using the word „hacker‟ to describe crackers; this irritates real
hackers no end.

The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break

them.

If you want to be a hacker, keep reading. If you want to be a

cracker, go read the alt.2600 newsgroup and get ready to do five to
ten in the slammer after finding out you aren't as smart as you
think you are. And that's all I'm going to say about crackers.

The Hacker Attitude

1. The world is full of fascinating 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.

Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe in

freedom and voluntary mutual help. To be accepted as a hacker,
you have to behave as though you have this kind of attitude
yourself. And to behave as though you have the attitude, you have
to really believe the attitude.

But if you think of cultivating hacker attitudes as just a way to gain

acceptance in the culture, you'll miss the point. Becoming the kind
of person who believes these things is important for you— for
helping you learn and keeping you motivated. As with all creative
arts, the most effective way to become a master is to imitate the
mind-set of masters — not just intellectually but emotionally as
well.

Or, as the following modern Zen poem has it:

To follow the path:

look to the master,
follow the master,
 walk with the master,
see through the master,
become the master.

So, if you want to be a hacker, repeat the following things until you
believe them:

1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.

Being a hacker is lots of fun, but it's a kind of fun that takes lots of
effort. The effort takes motivation. Successful athletes get their
motivation from a kind of physical delight in making their bodies
perform, in pushing themselves past their own physical limits.
Similarly, to be a hacker you have to get a basic thrill from solving
problems, sharpening your skills, and exercising your intelligence.

If you aren't the kind of person that feels this way naturally, you'll
need to become one in order to make it as a hacker. Otherwise
you'll find your hacking energy is sapped by distractions like sex,
money, and social approval.

(You also have to develop a kind of faith in your own learning

capacity — a belief that even though you may not know all of what
you need to solve a problem, if you tackle just a piece of it and
learn from that, you'll learn enough to solve the next piece — and
so on, until you're done.)

2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.

Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource. They shouldn't be
wasted on re-inventing the wheel when there are so many
fascinating new problems waiting out there.

To behave like a hacker, you have to believe that the thinking time
of other hackers is precious — so much so that it's almost a moral
duty for you to share information, solve problems and then give
the solutions away just so other hackers can solve new problems
instead of having to perpetually re-address old ones.

Note, however, that "No problem should ever have to be solved

twice." does not imply that you have to consider all existing
solutions sacred, or that there is only one right solution to any
given problem. Often, we learn a lot about the problem that we
didn't know before by studying the first cut at a solution. It's OK,
and often necessary, to decide that we can do better. What's not
OK is artificial technical, legal, or institutional barriers (like closed-
source code) that prevent a good solution from being re-used
and force people to re-invent wheels.

(You don't have to believe that you're obligated to give all your
creative product away, though the hackers that do are the ones
that get most respect from other hackers. It's consistent with
hacker values to sell enough of it to keep you in food and rent and
computers. It's fine to use your hacking skills to support a family or
even get rich, as long as you don't forget your loyalty to your art
and your fellow hackers while doing it.)

3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.

Hackers (and creative people in general) should never be bored or

have to drudge at stupid repetitive work, because when this
happens it means they aren't doing what only they can do — solve
new problems. This wastefulness hurts everybody. Therefore
boredom and drudgery are not just unpleasant but actually evil.

To behave like a hacker, you have to believe this enough to want

to automate away the boring bits as much as possible, not just for
yourself but for everybody else (especially other hackers).

(There is one apparent exception to this. Hackers will sometimes do

things that may seem repetitive or boring to an observer as a
mind-clearing exercise, or in order to acquire a skill or have some
particular kind of experience you can't have otherwise. But this is
by choice — nobody who can think should ever be forced into a
situation that bores them.)

4. Freedom is good.

Hackers are naturally anti-authoritarian. Anyone who can give you

orders can stop you from solving whatever problem you're being
fascinated by — and, given the way authoritarian minds work, will
generally find some appallingly stupid reason to do so. So the
authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it, lest it
smother you and other hackers.

(This isn't the same as fighting all authority. Children need to be

guided and criminals restrained. A hacker may agree to accept
some kinds of authority in order to get something he wants more
than the time he spends following orders. But that's a limited,
conscious bargain; the kind of personal surrender authoritarians
want is not on offer.)

Authoritarians thrive on censorship and secrecy. And they distrust

voluntary cooperation and information-sharing — they only like
„cooperation‟ that they control. So to behave like a hacker, you
have to develop an instinctive hostility to censorship, secrecy, and
the use of force or deception to compel responsible adults. And
you have to be willing to act on that belief.

5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.

To be a hacker, you have to develop some of these attitudes. But

copping an attitude alone won't make you a hacker, any more than
it will make you a champion athlete or a rock star. Becoming a
hacker will take intelligence, practice, dedication, and hard work.

Therefore, you have to learn to distrust attitude and respect

competence of every kind. Hackers won't let posers waste their
time, but they worship competence — especially competence at
hacking, but competence at anything is valued. Competence at
demanding skills that few can master is especially good, and
competence at demanding skills that involve mental acuteness,
craft, and concentration is best.

If you revere competence, you'll enjoy developing it in yourself —

the hard work and dedication will become a kind of intense play
rather than drudgery. That attitude is vital to becoming a hacker.

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, learn it.

The hacker attitude is vital, but skills are even more vital. Attitude is
no substitute for competence, and there's a certain basic toolkit of
skills which you have to have before any hacker will dream of
calling you one.

This toolkit changes slowly over time as technology creates new

skills and makes old ones obsolete. For example, it used to include
programming in machine language, and didn't until recently involve
HTML. But right now it pretty clearly includes the following:
1. Learn how to program.

This, of course, is the fundamental hacking skill. If you don't know

any computer languages, I recommend starting with Python. It is
cleanly designed, well documented, and relatively kind to
beginners. Despite being a good first language, it is not just a toy;
it is very powerful and flexible and well suited for large projects. I
have written a more detailed evaluation of Python.
Good tutorials are available at the Python web site.

I used to recommend Java as a good language to learn early,

but this critique has changed my mind (search for “The Pitfalls of
Java as a First Programming Language” within it). A hacker cannot,
as they devastatingly put it “approach problem-solving like a
plumber in a hardware store”; you have to know what the
components actually do. Now I think it is probably best to learn C
and Lisp first, then Java.

If you get into serious programming, you will have to learn C, the
core language of Unix. C++ is very closely related to C; if you know
one, learning the other will not be difficult. Neither language is a
good one to try learning as your first, however. And, actually, the
more you can avoid programming in C the more productive you
will be.

C is very efficient, and very sparing of your machine's resources.

Unfortunately, C gets that efficiency by requiring you to do a lot of
low-level management of resources (like memory) by hand. All that
low-level code is complex and bug-prone, and will soak up huge
amounts of your time on debugging. With today's machines as
powerful as they are, this is usually a bad tradeoff — it's smarter to
use a language that uses the machine's time less efficiently, but
your time much more efficiently. Thus, Python.

Other languages of particular importance to hackers

include Perl and LISP. Perl is worth learning for practical reasons; it's
very widely used for active web pages and system administration,
so that even if you never write Perl you should learn to read it.
Many people use Perl in the way I suggest you should use Python,
to avoid C programming on jobs that don't require C's machine
efficiency. You will need to be able to understand their code.

LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the profound

enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it.
That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of
your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot. (You can
get some beginning experience with LISP fairly easily by writing and
modifying editing modes for the Emacs text editor, or Script-Fu
plugins for the GIMP.)

It's best, actually, to learn all five of Python, C/C++, Java, Perl, and
LISP. Besides being the most important hacking languages, they
represent very different approaches to programming, and each will
educate you in valuable ways.

But be aware that you won't reach the skill level of a hacker or
even merely a programmer simply by accumulating languages —
you need to learn how to think about programming problems in a
general way, independent of any one language. To be a real hacker,
you need to get to the point where you can learn a new language
in days by relating what's in the manual to what you already know.
This means you should learn several very different languages.

I can't give complete instructions on how to learn to program here

— it's a complex skill. But I can tell you that books and courses
won't do it — many, maybe most of the best hackers are self-
taught. You can learn language features — bits of knowledge —
from books, but the mind-set that makes that knowledge into living
skill can be learned only by practice and apprenticeship. What will
do it is (a) reading code and (b) writing code.

Peter Norvig, who is one of Google's top hackers and the co-
author of the most widely used textbook on AI, has written an
excellent essay called Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. His
"recipe for programming success" is worth careful attention.

Learning to program is like learning to write good natural

language. The best way to do it is to read some stuff written by
masters of the form, write some things yourself, read a lot more,
write a little more, read a lot more, write some more ... and repeat
until your writing begins to develop the kind of strength and
economy you see in your models.

Finding good code to read used to be hard, because there were

few large programs available in source for fledgeling hackers to
read and tinker with. This has changed dramatically; open-source
software, programming tools, and operating systems (all built by
hackers) are now widely available. Which brings me neatly to our
next topic...

2. Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to use and run it.

I'll assume you have a personal computer or can get access to one.
(Take a moment to appreciate how much that means. The hacker
culture originally evolved back when computers were so expensive
that individuals could not own them.) The single most important
step any newbie can take toward acquiring hacker skills is to get a
copy of Linux or one of the BSD-Unixes or OpenSolaris, install it on
a personal machine, and run it.

Yes, there are other operating systems in the world besides Unix.
But they're distributed in binary — you can't read the code, and
you can't modify it. Trying to learn to hack on a Microsoft Windows
machine or under any other closed-source system is like trying to
learn to dance while wearing a body cast.
Under Mac OS X it's possible, but only part of the system is open
source — you're likely to hit a lot of walls, and you have to be
careful not to develop the bad habit of depending on Apple's
proprietary code. If you concentrate on the Unix under the hood
you can learn some useful things.

Unix is the operating system of the Internet. While you can learn to
use the Internet without knowing Unix, you can't be an Internet
hacker without understanding Unix. For this reason, the hacker
culture today is pretty strongly Unix-centered. (This wasn't always
true, and some old-time hackers still aren't happy about it, but the
symbiosis between Unix and the Internet has become strong
enough that even Microsoft's muscle doesn't seem able to seriously
dent it.)

So, bring up a Unix — I like Linux myself but there are other ways
(and yes, you can run both Linux and Microsoft Windows on the
same machine). Learn it. Run it. Tinker with it. Talk to the Internet
with it. Read the code. Modify the code. You'll get better
programming tools (including C, LISP, Python, and Perl) than any
Microsoft operating system can dream of hosting, you'll have fun,
and you'll soak up more knowledge than you realize you're learning
until you look back on it as a master hacker.

For more about learning Unix, see The Loginataka. You might also
want to have a look at The Art Of Unix Programming.
To get your hands on a Linux, see the Linux Online! site; you can
download from there or (better idea) find a local Linux user group
to help you with installation.

During the first ten years of this HOWTO's life, I reported that from
a new user's point of view, all Linux distributions are almost
equivalent. But in 2006-2007, an actual best choice
emerged: Ubuntu. While other distros have their own areas of
strength, Ubuntu is far and away the most accessible to Linux
newbies.

You can find BSD Unix help and resources at www.bsd.org.

A good way to dip your toes in the water is to boot up what Linux
fans call a live CD, a distribution that runs entirely off a CD without
having to modify your hard disk. This will be slow, because CDs are
slow, but it's a way to get a look at the possibilities without having
to do anything drastic.

I have written a primer on the basics of Unix and the Internet.

I used to recommend against installing either Linux or BSD as a

solo project if you're a newbie. Nowadays the installers have gotten
good enough that doing it entirely on your own is possible, even
for a newbie. Nevertheless, I still recommend making contact with
your local Linux user's group and asking for help. It can't hurt, and
may smooth the process.
3. Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write HTML.

Most of the things the hacker culture has built do their work out of
sight, helping run factories and offices and universities without any
obvious impact on how non-hackers live. The Web is the one big
exception, the huge shiny hacker toy that even politicians admit has
changed the world. For this reason alone (and a lot of other good
ones as well) you need to learn how to work the Web.

This doesn't just mean learning how to drive a browser (anyone can
do that), but learning how to write HTML, the Web's markup
language. If you don't know how to program, writing HTML will
teach you some mental habits that will help you learn. So build a
home page. Try to stick to XHTML, which is a cleaner language
than classic HTML. (There are good beginner tutorials on the
Web; here's one.)

But just having a home page isn't anywhere near good enough to
make you a hacker. The Web is full of home pages. Most of them
are pointless, zero-content sludge — very snazzy-looking sludge,
mind you, but sludge all the same (for more on this see The HTML
Hell Page).

To be worthwhile, your page must have content — it must be

interesting and/or useful to other hackers. And that brings us to
the next topic...

4. If you don't have functional English, learn it.

As an American and native English-speaker myself, I have previously
been reluctant to suggest this, lest it be taken as a sort of cultural
imperialism. But several native speakers of other languages have
urged me to point out that English is the working language of the
hacker culture and the Internet, and that you will need to know it
to function in the hacker community.

Back around 1991 I learned that many hackers who have English as
a second language use it in technical discussions even when they
share a birth tongue; it was reported to me at the time that English
has a richer technical vocabulary than any other language and is
therefore simply a better tool for the job. For similar reasons,
translations of technical books written in English are often
unsatisfactory (when they get done at all).

Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently

never occurred to him to do otherwise). His fluency in English has
been an important factor in his ability to recruit a worldwide
community of developers for Linux. It's an example worth following.

Being a native English-speaker does not guarantee that you have

language skills good enough to function as a hacker. If your writing
is semi-literate, ungrammatical, and riddled with misspellings, many
hackers (including myself) will tend to ignore you. While sloppy
writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally
found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for
sloppy thinkers. If you can't yet write competently, learn to.

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

Like most cultures without a money economy, hackerdom runs on

reputation. You're trying to solve interesting problems, but how
interesting they are, and whether your solutions are really good, is
something that only your technical peers or superiors are normally
equipped to judge.

Accordingly, when you play the hacker game, you learn to keep
score primarily by what other hackers think of your skill (this is why
you aren't really a hacker until other hackers consistently call you
one). This fact is obscured by the image of hacking as solitary work;
also by a hacker-cultural taboo (gradually decaying since the late
1990s but still potent) against admitting that ego or external
validation are involved in one's motivation at all.
Specifically, hackerdom is what anthropologists call a gift culture.
You gain status and reputation in it not by dominating other
people, nor by being beautiful, nor by having things other people
want, but rather by giving things away. Specifically, by giving away
your time, your creativity, and the results of your skill.

There are basically five kinds of things you can do to be respected

by hackers:

1. Write open-source software

The first (the most central and most traditional) is to write

programs that other hackers think are fun or useful, and give the
program sources away to the whole hacker culture to use.

(We used to call these works “free software”, but this confused too
many people who weren't sure exactly what “free” was supposed to
mean. Most of us now prefer the term “open-source” software).

Hackerdom's most revered demigods are people who have written

large, capable programs that met a widespread need and given
them away, so that now everyone uses them.

But there's a bit of a fine historical point here. While hackers have
always looked up to the open-source developers among them as
our community's hardest core, before the mid-1990s most hackers
most of the time worked on closed source. This was still true when
I wrote the first version of this HOWTO in 1996; it took the
mainstreaming of open-source software after 1997 to change
things. Today, "the hacker community" and "open-source
developers" are two descriptions for what is essentially the same
culture and population — but it is worth remembering that this was
not always so.

2. Help test and debug open-source software

They also serve who stand and debug open-source software. In this
imperfect world, we will inevitably spend most of our software
development time in the debugging phase. That's why any open-
source author who's thinking will tell you that good beta-testers
(who know how to describe symptoms clearly, localize problems
well, can tolerate bugs in a quickie release, and are willing to apply
a few simple diagnostic routines) are worth their weight in rubies.
Even one of these can make the difference between a debugging
phase that's a protracted, exhausting nightmare and one that's
merely a salutary nuisance.

If you're a newbie, try to find a program under development that

you're interested in and be a good beta-tester. There's a natural
progression from helping test programs to helping debug them to
helping modify them. You'll learn a lot this way, and generate good
karma with people who will help you later on.

3. Publish useful information

Another good thing is to collect and filter useful and interesting
information into web pages or documents like Frequently Asked
Questions (FAQ) lists, and make those generally available.

Maintainers of major technical FAQs get almost as much respect as

open-source authors.

4. Help keep the infrastructure working

The hacker culture (and the engineering development of the

Internet, for that matter) is run by volunteers. There's a lot of
necessary but unglamorous work that needs done to keep it going
— administering mailing lists, moderating newsgroups, maintaining
large software archive sites, developing RFCs and other technical
standards.

People who do this sort of thing well get a lot of respect, because
everybody knows these jobs are huge time sinks and not as much
fun as playing with code. Doing them shows dedication.

5. Serve the hacker culture itself

Finally, you can serve and propagate the culture itself (by, for
example, writing an accurate primer on how to become a hacker :-
)). This is not something you'll be positioned to do until you've
been around for while and become well-known for one of the first
four things.
The hacker culture doesn't have leaders, exactly, but it does have
culture heroes and tribal elders and historians and spokespeople.
When you've been in the trenches long enough, you may grow into
one of these. Beware: hackers distrust blatant ego in their tribal
elders, so visibly reaching for this kind of fame is dangerous. Rather
than striving for it, you have to sort of position yourself so it drops
in your lap, and then be modest and gracious about your status.

The Hacker/Nerd Connection

Contrary to popular myth, you don't have to be a nerd to be a

hacker. It does help, however, and many hackers are in fact nerds.
Being something of a social outcast helps you stay concentrated on
the really important things, like thinking and hacking.

For this reason, many hackers have adopted the label „geek‟ as a
badge of pride — it's a way of declaring their independence from
normal social expectations (as well as a fondness for other things
like science fiction and strategy games that often go with being a
hacker). The term 'nerd' used to be used this way back in the
1990s, back when 'nerd' was a mild pejorative and 'geek' a rather
harsher one; sometime after 2000 they switched places, at least in
U.S. popular culture, and there is now even a significant geek-pride
culture among people who aren't techies.
If you can manage to concentrate enough on hacking to be good
at it and still have a life, that's fine. This is a lot easier today than it
was when I was a newbie in the 1970s; mainstream culture is much
friendlier to techno-nerds now. There are even growing numbers of
people who realize that hackers are often high-quality lover and
spouse material.

If you're attracted to hacking because you don't have a life, that's

OK too — at least you won't have trouble concentrating. Maybe
you'll get a life later on.

Points For Style

Again, to be a hacker, you have to enter the hacker mindset. There

are some things you can do when you're not at a computer that
seem to help. They're not substitutes for hacking (nothing is) but
many hackers do them, and feel that they connect in some basic
way with the essence of hacking.

 Learn to write your native language well. Though it's a

common stereotype that programmers can't write, a surprising
number of hackers (including all the most accomplished ones I
know of) are very able writers.
  Read science fiction. Go to science fiction conventions (a good
way to meet hackers and proto-hackers).
 Train in a martial-arts form. The kind of mental discipline
required for martial arts seems to be similar in important ways
to what hackers do. The most popular forms among hackers
are definitely Asian empty-hand arts such as Tae Kwon Do,
various forms of Karate, Kung Fu, Aikido, or Ju Jitsu. Western
fencing and Asian sword arts also have visible followings. In
places where it's legal, pistol shooting has been rising in
popularity since the late 1990s. The most hackerly martial arts
are those which emphasize mental discipline, relaxed
awareness, and control, rather than raw strength, athleticism,
or physical toughness.
 Study an actual meditation discipline. The perennial favorite
among hackers is Zen (importantly, it is possible to benefit
from Zen without acquiring a religion or discarding one you
already have). Other styles may work as well, but be careful to
choose one that doesn't require you to believe crazy things.
 Develop an analytical ear for music. Learn to appreciate
peculiar kinds of music. Learn to play some musical instrument
well, or how to sing.
 Develop your appreciation of puns and wordplay.

The more of these things you already do, the more likely it is that
you are natural hacker material. Why these things in particular is
not completely clear, but they're connected with a mix of left- and
right-brain skills that seems to be important; hackers need to be
able to both reason logically and step outside the apparent logic of
a problem at a moment's notice.

Work as intensely as you play and play as intensely as you work.

For true hackers, the boundaries between "play", "work", "science"
and "art" all tend to disappear, or to merge into a high-level
creative playfulness. Also, don't be content with a narrow range of
skills. Though most hackers self-describe as programmers, they are
very likely to be more than competent in several related skills —
system administration, web design, and PC hardware
troubleshooting are common ones. A hacker who's a system
administrator, on the other hand, is likely to be quite skilled at
script programming and web design. Hackers don't do things by
halves; if they invest in a skill at all, they tend to get very good at
it.

Finally, a few things not to do.

 Don't use a silly, grandiose user ID or screen name.

 Don't get in flame wars on Usenet (or anywhere else).
 Don't call yourself a „cyberpunk‟, and don't waste your time on
anybody who does.
 Don't post or email writing that's full of spelling errors and
bad grammar.
The only reputation you'll make doing any of these things is as a
twit. Hackers have long memories — it could take you years to live
your early blunders down enough to be accepted.

The problem with screen names or handles deserves some

amplification. Concealing your identity behind a handle is a juvenile
and silly behavior characteristic of crackers, warez d00dz, and other
lower life forms. Hackers don't do this; they're proud of what they
do and want it associated with their real names. So if you have a
handle, drop it. In the hacker culture it will only mark you as a
loser.