Humor Books - Page 3

The Spam Letters

Jonathan Land

Amazon Price: $14.95 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: No Starch Press Amazon Marketplace: 39 new & used starting at $0.41

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

This should be required reading. 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 6 people found this review helpful.

This is one of those books that everyone should read - so that we can all vicariously through Jon Land's dive into the land of spammers... and in agreement with others - catching him on NPR is more than a treat - its an addiction waiting to happen (think chocolate).
For the geek and for the not-so-geekish, this book serves as a living history of the frustrations we all have felt when dealing with SPAM. Mr. Land just found a great way give some of that frustration back to the SPAMMERS - and to give us geeks something to chuckle about when reading about V|AGRA or the fortunes that await us in Nigeria... and we can take comfort in knowing that we're not alone in out frustrations.
Thank you, Jon!

Editorial Review:

From the man behind TheSpamLetters.com - featured in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, and Slashdot - comes a collection of brilliant and entertaining correspondence with the people who send out mass junk emailings (a.k.a. spam). Compiled from the nearly 200 entries written by Jonathan Land, The Spam Letters taunts, prods, and parodies the faceless salespeople in your inbox, giving you a chuckle at their expense. If you hate spam, you'll love The Spam Letters.

The Good the Spam and the Ugly

Steve H. Graham

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 18:38:09 +0000 (GMT)

To: honbarrsedd4za@yahoo.co.in
PROPOSAL FOR URGENT ASSISTANCE
Dear Sir: I must solicit your confidence in this transaction. I am a high placed official with the Department of Finance Affairs in Lagos, Nigeria. I and two other colleagues are in need of a silent foreign partner whose bank account we can use to transfer the sum of $18,000,000. This are monies left by a barrister who died tragically in a plane crash last year...

Sound familiar? Congratulations. You have been selected to become a mugu, an expression African con artists use to describe the targets of their e-mail scams. But they drew a bead on the wrong guy when they started spamming Steve H. Graham. Like many Internet users, Graham eventually got tired of receiving mugu mail and decided to fire back at his wannabe swindlers.

Armed with a scathing sense of humor, Graham quickly turned the tables on his tormenters--with side-splittingly hilarious results. Whether he's referring to his fictional lawyer Biff Wellington, complaining about the injury he received while milking a lactating sloth, or offering the Preparation H helpline as his phone number, Graham--using aliases such as Wile E. Coyote, Barney Rubble, and Herman Munster--offers proof that spamming the spammers is the best revenge.

Steve H. Graham is a retired attorney. Since childhood, he has been fighting for truth, justice, and free movie passes. For each copy sold of this book, he will donate 100 percent of the proceeds to himself. He is also the author of the cookbook Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man. He lives in Miami.

Are You a Geek?: 1,000 Ways to Find Out

Tim Collins

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Nerds not only welcome, but encouraged 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Nerds are everywhere! They just don't own up to it. Here's your chance to prove once and for all where on the nerd spectrum you lie.

A lot of the question here are amusing that they would even be asked (i.e. You've read a dictionary for pleasure 1 point). The questions are categorized so you can pinpoint just how nerdy you are in various aspects of your life (and you can laugh at those nerdier than you).

It's not foolproof though; I received 0 points for being in my high school and college chess clubs. And I only rate as geek (as opposed to übergeek, nerd, or the feared nerdmeister general). But still highly amusing.

Question I'm most ashamed I had to admit to:
You can count in hexadecimal. A points

Editorial Review:

Let’s face it–we all do geeky things, from checking e-mail obsessively to playing video games to tripping over our own feet. But here’s your chance to find out just how much of a geek you really are. With 1,000 questions for every area of your life–from childhood to lifestyle to entertainment to sex (you met your wife in a Web chat room–3 points), Are You a Geek? helps measure your precise geek quotient. From challenging intelligence quizzes to testing your dating compatibility with “Geekline,” Are You a Geek? lets you in on the secrets that separate the geeks from the grown-ups. Or the nerdmeisters from everyone else…

Dating Design Patterns

Solveig Haugland

Amazon Price: $19.99 List Price: $19.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Solveig Haugland Amazon Marketplace: 9 new & used starting at $11.96

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Design Patterns Conspiracy: How It All Happened When the Gang, as well as Grady, Christopher, and the Fifth member of the Gang of Four, Steve Swillvellis, were in college, they invented the ultimate reusable set of patterns for the most complex system of interactions available: dating. Their success with women was famous throughout the state. As Christopher said at the time, "Do you have any idea how unusual that is, for guys who read Knuth for fun?"

Then the sweet smell of success turned bitter. They realized that their grades were slipping, they were no longer as interested in computer science, and that they had more than once considered careers in marketing. They realized that while it is extremely pleasurable to have the dating world by the tail, that there were Higher Considerations. The scientific advancement and the economy of the world would be destroyed if all geeks were out dancing on Saturday nights instead of debugging.

So they suppressed their work and, to distract those who had heard of their remarkable book on patterns, they produced Design Patterns instead.

The dating work remained suppressed until the Fifth member of the Gang of Four could keep silent no longer and brought forth the original WordStar manuscripts, additional notes still penciled in the margins. He asked the Gang of Females to edit and publish the work.

21 Dog Years : A Cube Dweller's Tale

Mike Daisey

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 67 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 1998, when Amazon.com began to recruit employees, they gave temp agencies a simple directive: send us your freaks. Mike Daisey -- slacker, onetime aesthetics major -- fit the bill. His subsequent ascension, over the course of twenty-one dog years, from lowly temp to customer service representative to business development hustler is the stuff of both dreams and nightmares. Here, with lunatic precision, Daisey describes lightless cube farms in which book orders were scrawled on Post-its while technicians struggled to bring computers back online, as well as fourteen-hour days fueled by caffeine, fanaticism, and illicit day-trading from office desks made out of doors.

You'll meet Warren, the cowboy of customer service, capable of verbally hog-tying even the most abusive customer; Amazon employee #5, a computer gamer who spends at least six hours a day locked in his office killing goblins but is worth a cool $300 million; and Jean-Michele, Daisey's girlfriend and sparring partner, who tries to keep him grounded, even as dot-com mania seduces them both.

Punctuated by Daisey's hysterically honest fictional missives to CEO Jeff Bezos, 21 Dog Years is an epic story of greed, self-deception, and heartbreak -- a wickedly funny anthem to an era of bounteous stock options and boundless insanity.

The History Of Webcomics

T Campbell

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

From an expert 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 9 people found this review helpful.

WebComic author T Campbell is one of the most respected figures in the WebComic world. He contributes to six comics on wide variety of topics. This is an expansion on his posts from Comixpedia.

Webcomics originated in the 1990's with artists whose topics were not traditional for publication in newspapers. These young creators thought outside of the box and started to publish serial comics online for others to read. No one would know how much of an impact these first artists would have because ten years later hundreds of comics had sprung up all over the web and a whole generation of artists, writers, and fans created an amazing chapter in Internet history. To learn more about webcomic origins, and the impact on the art, fan, and computer world read this book from someone who is one of the most experienced in the field.

Editorial Review:

One of the more remarkable phenomena associated with the World Wide Web is the web comic: serialized comics strips (or single-panel episodes) produced originally and specially for viewing on the web. Noted web historian T. Campbell has compiled a comprehensive history of this remarkable development in the comics industry and history of literature.

Techmares: The World's Dumbest Computer Users

Timothy D McLendon

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

You've seen all this before 1 out of 5 stars.
3 of 5 people found this review helpful.

If you've read anything online about Tech Support and dumb computer users, then you'll already read this book.

I had high hopes of reading some funny, new, interesting stories. This book was a big disappointment. I don't think there was anything here that I hadn't already seen online at sites like www.idiotwatchers.com

I was hoping for something more like Computerworld's Shark Tank.

At any rate, save yourself some money and just look for items like this online. You won't miss a thing.

I think i'm the tech in some of these lol 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Tim was a level 2 tech where I work. Some of these stories are straight from there. This book should be shipped with every computer with a disclaimer that reads:Unless you can honestly say that you will not be a canidate for the sequel of this book and are not under the effects of alcohol or medication and none of the walls are padded in the room you're in do not call technical support you will be transferred to the id10t (pronounced- eye dee ten tee) queue. :P

This book is hilariously funny! I can't wait for the sequel! (there will be a sequel right tim?) James

Editorial Review:

"Do I have to be online to download a file?"

"It just comes up with a message and says click OK...now what?"

"Is that the letter zero or the number zero?"

Tech Support will never be the same after you meet the world's dumbest computer users. They crawl out from the far corners of the Earth to destroy intelligence as we know it. Proceed with caution.

The Complete April Fools' Day RFCs

Thomas, A. Limoncelli, Peter, H. Salus

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

all the April Fools' RFCs in one place!!! 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This is a compilation of the best April Fools jokes created by the IETF, the group that creates the standards for how the Internet works. The best humor for the geek in your life, or a great conversation starter at a lan party. Also has commentary from Limoncelli and some other internet gods. Worth many geek points - full of lulz!!

The Root of All Evil

JD Frazer, Illiad, Bob Herbstman

Amazon Price: $11.01 List Price: $12.95 In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served. By: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Amazon Marketplace: 16 new & used starting at $0.01

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Very funny stuff 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

If you don't find at least some of the strips very funny, you should have your geek status removed. :)

Editorial Review:

If you've read the first two User Friendly books from O'Reilly, you don't need an introduction to Greg, Jeff, Miranda, the Dust Puppy, and the others. But if you haven't, welcome to Columbia Internet, "the friendliest, hardest-working, and most neurotic little Internet Service Provider in the world," for our third installment from the hit online comic, User Friendly. The cast: Quake-obsessed techies, self- absorbed sales staff, well-meaning execs, and assorted almost-humans. The background: too little office space, warring operating systems, and eternally clueless customers. Enter the special world of the hard-core geek, where humor--especially at one's own foibles--can be a survival skill. Since this is true of most work environments, chances are you won't have to know much Unix to get the joke. In fact, Illiad's one million readers include all kinds of people--from 8-year-old girls to 81-year-old women--a large, diverse, and very loyal community.

Techies Unite: Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet

Peter Zale

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

readers unite! 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

Peter Zale's "Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet" is a very cool strip. Gotta love Helen--so nice to see a strong female character with mechanical ability for once.

Grouping the strips into categories was a smart move on the author's part. Makes this book more readable that the usual book of comic strips.

Editorial Review:

Voted Internet Magazine's Cool Site of the Day, winner of the Talespinner Award, Daryl Cagle's "Top Pencil" Award, and The Medaille d'Or for Site Excellence, Peter Zale's Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet has taken the Internet by storm and is now making its move to newspaper syndication. This alternative comic strip will be making the unprecedented move from the electronic underground to the forefront of comic strip mainstream this summer and includes new, never-before- seen material. The strip appeals to techies and non-techies alike with its unique blend of geek savvy and techno-phobic attitude. Techies Unite centers on a beautiful and brilliant computer geek who at twenty-four runs the information systems department of a large company. Peter Zales's strip brings to light the comic ironies about humankind that have come about due to the rapid advances in technology.