Hackers and Painters

Paul Graham wrote Hackers and Painters for noody computer programmers looking to get into programming. A lot of what I'm reading write now is for beginners because I, myself, am a beginner. Graham is a credible hacker. He and a friend/business partner created, what he claims to be, the first solely web-based application. Viaweb, the site that he built, would allow the user to build a web-store right from the site. Viaweb ended up getting bought out by Yahoo! for quite a substantial amount of money. Graham talked about what it was like to start a start up business. He described it as putting a life time of effort into a 2-5 years and getting paid the figure for it. 

One of the points that he made that stood out to me was that computer science isn't really a science. Computer Science is actually an art. Like art you always are creating your own version of things straight from the start, even though it is probably not so good looking and a little sloppy. In a science you start out by copying things you know will work until you have enough understanding to do work on things no one understands. Computer science is quite the opposite. I really like looking at computer science as an art. Code can be beautiful and a lot of the times its the simplicity of code that does it. 

Over all, Graham gives good advice for beginners. He describes a lot of the popular programming languages and the pros and cons of them. In his opinion, Lisp is the best language out there. I think it would be fun to take a stab at it. I've decided to start learning python for right now, which Graham gives a lot of credit to. In class I'm learning C++, which, at this point, I don't know how useful it will be to me. But i can learn the concepts with professors help.