How To Become A Hacker
As editor of the Jargon File and author of a few other well-known documents of similar nature, I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies asking (in effect) "how can I learn to be a wizardly hacker?". Back in 1996 I noticed that there didn't seem to be any other FAQs or web documents that addressed this vital question, so I started this one. A lot of hackers now consider it definitive, and I suppose that means it is. Still, I don't claim to be the exclusive authority on this topic; if you don't like what you read here, write your own.
If you are reading a snapshot of this document offline, the current version lives at http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html.
Note: there is a list of Frequently Asked Questions at the end of this document. Please read these—twice—before mailing me any questions about this document.
Numerous translations of this document are available: Arabic Belorussian Bulgarian Chinese, Czech. Danish Dutch Estonian French German, Greek Hungarian, Italian Hebrew, Japanese Lithuanian Norwegian, Persian Polish Portuguese (Brazilian), Romanian Spanish, Turkish, and Swedish. Note that since this document changes occasionally, they may be out of date to varying degrees.
