"The world is like the Wild West of intellectual computer, where you can shoot anyone you want with your ideas, if you're willing to risk the consequences." - From Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham We live in an era of computers, in a world increasingly designed and engineered by computer programmers and software designers, by people who call themselves hackers. Consider these facts: Everything around us is transformed into a computer. Your phone has turned into a computer. Your car is not only designed on computers, but has more processing power in it than the room-sized mainframe did in 1970. Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham, explains this world and the motivation of the people who occupy it. Topics include the importance of beauty in software design, how to make wealth, heresy and free speaking, the programming language renaissance, the open source movement, digital design, internet startups, and more. And this sense what will you find in Hackers & Painters: "In most fields the great work done early. Andy Hertzfeld, co-creator of the Macintosh computer, says about Hackers & Painters: "Paul Graham is a hacker, painter and writer great. Paul Graham, designer of the new Arc language, was the creator of Yahoo Store, the first web-based applications. Besides a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, Graham also studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Accademia Belle Arti in Florence.