Source Code: My Beginnings (Unabridged)
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4.4 • 49 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The origin story of one of the most influential and transformative business leaders and philanthropists of the modern age
“A surprisingly candid memoir of the Microsoft mogul’s early years…Reading this book feels like watching someone take a well-known black-and-white sketch, fill in the details, and paint it in vivid color.” —GeekWire
Everyone is programmed a little differently, and Bill Gates' unique insight led to business triumphs that are now widely known: the twenty-year-old who dropped out of Harvard to start a software company that became an industry giant and changed the way the world works and lives; the billionaire many times over who turned his attention to philanthropic pursuits to address climate change, global health, and U.S. education.
Source Code is not about Microsoft or the Gates Foundation or the future of technology. It’s the human, personal story of how Bill Gates became who he is today: his childhood, his early passions and pursuits. It’s the story of his principled grandmother and ambitious parents, his first deep friendships and the sudden death of his best friend; of his struggles to fit in and his discovery of a world of coding and computers in the dawn of a new era; of embarking in his early teens on a path that took him from midnight escapades at a nearby computer center to his college dorm room, where he sparked a revolution that would change the world.
Bill Gates tells this, his own story, for the first time: wise, warm, revealing, it’s a fascinating portrait of an American life.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Bill Gates’ enlightening childhood memoir finds a fresh angle on his achievements as an IT pioneer. Source Code fills in key blanks of the tech guru’s pre-Microsoft life, with Gates detailing his formative years in his own words, covering emotional topics from his feelings of isolation as a high-achieving misfit to the eye-opening freedom he felt upon discovering pursuits like hiking and his wonder at his first exposure to rudimentary computers. Source Code is more tender than you might expect, filled with affectionate descriptions of his grandmother, who not only gave unconditional love but taught him how to harness his brain through games of strategy. It has its heart-wrenching moments, too: Gates doesn’t shy away from difficult periods of his life, like the grief and anger he felt and then harnessed after the death of a close teenage friend. Star Trek: The Next Generation and The Big Bang Theory’s Wil Wheaton handles the bulk of the narration, delivering Gates’ words with passion. Source Code pulls back the curtain on a global leader with thoughtful ruminations on the contributions of love, friendship, and family to his success.
Customer Reviews
See AllLove if computer history
I loved the content and the prologue and epilogue read by Gates. I wish he had read the entire book himself. Though Will Wheaton is a well known actor, I felt his dynamics in active voice detracted from Gates’ actual personality. If I still had the level of vision to read it in print, I would have done so. If you have that opportunity, take it. This a worthwhile memoir of stuff we now take for granted. Personal computers and the software that drives them. What a unique person Gates is.
Needs a better narrator
The reader is less than desirable. He gets quieter at the end of phrases and hard to understand. Recommend buying the book and not the audio.
Great Book About Growing Up and How Proximity Matters in Who You Become
This is my first Gates book. It’s super interesting to read about his early life and how the people around him influenced his life and the creation of Microsoft. It’s a lot more disconnected than one might expect. The early loss of a friend and poor business decisions early on helped him grow quickly to build a powerhouse global technology company.