⇒ PDF Microserfs Douglas Coupland 9780060987046 Books

Microserfs Douglas Coupland 9780060987046 Books

Download As PDF : Microserfs Douglas Coupland 9780060987046 Books

Microserfs Douglas Coupland 9780060987046 Books

Great novel! Clearly bad OCR of it for Kindle version. The obvious OCR misreads make it struggle to get through certain sections.


Tags : Microserfs [Douglas Coupland] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Narrated in the form of a Powerbook entry by Dan Underwood, a computer programmer for Microsoft, this state-of-the-art novel about life in the '90s follows the adventures of six code-crunching computer whizzes. Known as microserfs,Douglas Coupland,Microserfs,Harper Perennial,0060987049,COUPLAND, DOUGLAS - PROSE & CRITICISM,FICTION General,Fiction,Fiction - General,GENERAL,General Adult,POPULAR AMERICAN FICTION

Microserfs Douglas Coupland 9780060987046 Books Reviews

Book itself is great, I love it. Have read the digital version (multiple times) and decided to get the hardcover version just to own it.
That is a disappointment, paper is very cheap
I wanted to like Microserfs, but frankly, there's a lot of nothing in here. The plot leaves Microsoft pretty quickly and I kept waiting for something, anything to happen. In the end it felt like a pile of spaghetti code that ultimately leads to nowhere.
This would easily be a 4 star book for me and in paperback I'd give it that in a heartbeat but the edition is horrible. It seems like someone ran a hardcopy through a scanner and then OCR'ed it without proofreading it at all. There are letters missing, a few entire words missing and many, many instances of the wrong letter over and over (like a U instead of a V - there's an entire section where it says Silicon Ualley over and over) and places where the wrong word was picked up (ie - Interiority becomes Inferiority, somewhat appropriate in describing this edition).

I've read the book before and enjoyed it but the edition was a bit of a chore. It looks like the publisher didn't even proofread this book once before uploading it. A shame, really.
This is a good book. Perhaps it is not as strong as Gen X or Shampoo Planet--or those Harolding moments in Portraits--but still a quite decent read. Although at times, the plot is a bit slow. Coupland accurately portrays characters whose cyber-world consists of computer games, coding, and geeky emails.
This is a must for those of us who deeply empathize with thematic elements in films such as Office Space or Trees Lounge. I actually was acquainted with a real housemates couple in Berkeley who could be characters in this novel, who in their "free time" romantically played computer games with each other and otherwise spent vast amounts of time behind a computer screen.
I remember the world before Atari and the internet. I recall anxious nuclear holocaust days prior to when "cyberspace" was a regular constituent in our mental vocabulary. Perhaps technology does in fact ennoble our human values and aspirations, or perhaps it is a means of convenient evasion from self-knowledge.
Coupland explores some of these concerns in this novel with real-life characters who could mirror those folks in tech cultures (Irvine, Silicon Valley, Seattle, and/or Portland)--a culture that is both oddly familiar yet cubicled in silence--nameless shadows who input code and ship products for our servile consumption.
I first read Coupland's Generation X in the late 90's. After moving to the PAcific Northwest and working for a handful of dot.coms before and after the bust, I picked up this book in hopes of finding other stories of tech geeks with no life so I didn't feel so abnormal.
Whity, funny, yet emotionally honest and soul piercing at times, this book reveals the true nature of IT workers during the climb of the IT field. Written in 94 (i think), many of the lifestyles that Coupland wrote about then still hold true today. It showed me just how much of an IT slave I really am, but that freedom must first come from within, and that I am still a human being even though I work 60-70 hour work weeks. Is there a life outside of IT?
I think so! This book shows me the way and allows me to laugh at myself and the stupididty of my way of life. Thanks Doug...thanks for showing me there is more to life than computers.
kevin
An good read if you're interested in the culture of Silicon Valley in the 90s but prefer reading a narrative rather than non-fiction. Coupland manages to create believable characters and place them in a real setting so flawlessly that I often found myself forgetting that the book was fiction at all. Nevertheless, he also manages to create intriguing and occasionally dramatic plot points that drive character development while simultaneously demonstrating the positive and negative aspects of being a programmer. The book has its flaws; paragraphs can start to become very wordy and it uses its share of literary cliches, but if you can look past these sort of things it's definitely worth a read if you want a short but in-depth look at a group of coders who live together, spend hours on end coding, interact in very surreal and yet believable ways, and are fascinated (or terrified) by the future of technology.
This book's major strength, in my opinion, is its prophetic view of what "The Net" will become, from the predecessor to Twitter (at Apple) to word clouds. It is told from the viewpoint of a programmer (it's basically his diary) so that gave the author a little leeway in terms of style and vocabulary, which I sort of viewed as a cop out at first. The character is very likeable though, so the problems I had with the style actually became endearing as I flipped the pages. The ending is sort of anti-climactic, but I do respect the lack of blatant drama which is prevalent in generic fiction.

Also I really love the references to "Bill." All in all, a fun read with some incredibly interesting insights into what the internet has become.
Great novel! Clearly bad OCR of it for version. The obvious OCR misreads make it struggle to get through certain sections.