Book review: The BBook of Geek

Hi all

Just finished reading The BBook of Geek and wanted to share a short review.

The book is a sort of almanac of geek topics. It is divided into eight sections, or “pillars”, each consisting of 16 topics. The eight pillars are:

1. Software
2. TV
3. Literature
4. Gaming
5. Movies
6. Science
7. Hardware
8. Internet

Within each of the eight sections, 16 geek topics are discussed (a total of 2^8 topics) with a brief introduction, some “facts” (some of which are true, and some of which are not (the exercise of knowing which is which is left to the reader)), and a page of each topic is dedicated to something funny. This could be a list of words that you need to decide whether they are a programming language or a movie robot, a top-10 list of something or some prose which is a funny story – often with some funny details.

The page numbers of the book are in hexadecimal, meaning that there is a page 1B and so on. You will find the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy on page number 42, naturally, and the book states, that there are 31 other “coincidences” between the page number and the topic of the page. That’s 32 in total, naturally - 2^6. I only discovered the one about Hitchhikers Guide, though… which is even mentioned explicitly in the introduction of the book But to be fair, I wasn’t really looking…

To be honest, I am happy to announce, that there were SEVERAL topics, of which I knew absolutely nothing. Perhaps even 20% of the topics, actually. This means I am not a total geek…

The topics you know are by far the most funny to read, but there are all in all a whole lot of fun stuff to read. The book states that you don’t have to be a geek to read it, but I’d say it definitely helps

So, go buy and read!

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