“Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary” is a book about the life of Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, till the year 2001. It has been written by Linus and David Diamond.
I was eagerly looking forward to reading this book, but it has turned out to be a disappointment. It begins awfully and ends even more awfully. The interesting part is in the middle of book where Linus describes the creation of the Linux operating system. It was also fascinating to read about his complete obsession with computer programming, to the detriment of almost everything else in life, during his teenage years and even later, since this was just what had happened to yours truly and around the same time in life. To be fair, the book does have a few funny lines and provides more than a couple of great insights into Linus's life and opinions. Perhaps I had unreasonable expectations of this book, being a fellow geek and an enthusiastic user of Linux, but I suspect even non-geeks will be disappointed by this book. There are also more than a few glaring typographical mistakes that make me wonder whether this book was put together by incompetent people or people in a hurry to cash in on the buzz around Linux at the time of publishing.