Alan Kay

"I have never forgotten the combined shock and thrill of making my way through this in my 20s."

"It is actually a 'math book' — with lots of ideas, theorems, proofs, etc., — but presented in the friendliest way imaginable by a great mind."

"A few more books like this, and by the time I got to first grade I had been ruined for the 'single book - single truth' ideas of school and church."

"This has the same thought expanding properties of Lisp."

"A real gem for helping to think about design and implementations."

"A much stronger way to think about computing — and what 'Computer Science' might mean."

"An early look and experience with timeless truths (and gotchas) from systems building with teams."

"For many years it has been the best single volume narrative of 'life from scratch'."

"A formative book in so many ways."

"A very different kind of book."

"A lovely book to read."

"I have called this the 'Maxwell’s Equations' of computing, because it presents a very large part of what’s important about programming languages."

"A formative book in so many ways."

"[My wife] completely nailed the Arthur Conan Doyle voice of the characters and narrative, while being able to carry a marvelous story into the much larger realm of the novel."

"One of the books that Bob Barton had us read in his famous advanced systems design class in 1967."