When I was 13 and just learning to program, I found a paper copy of The Cathedral & The Bazaar at my library and read it along with The Jargon File and How To Be A Hacker. I found ESR's authority as a Real Hacker so compelling that I started taking krav maga classes because at one point in How To Be A Hacker he mentions that Real Hackers do martial arts. (This turned out to be one of the best decisions I made at 13, and I'm still on it.) Since then, I've been more exposed to ESR the bigoted gun-obsessed coprolith, and How To Be A Hacker has taken on a rather more sinister tone for me in its prescriptions and evaluations of people's hacker cred. It did teenage-me a terrible disservice by suggesting that open source is more welcoming environment for women than proprietary software communities and general tech people. I would not, in fact, recommend anything written by ESR to a young programmer at this point.