Source Code

Refreshingly frank ... Bill Gates is John McEnroe of the tech world ... [he] recounts the first two decades of his life, from his birth in 1955 to the founding of Microsoft and its agreement to supply a version of the Basic programming language to Apple Computer in 1977. There is a genuine gratitude for influential mentors, and a wry mood of self-deprecation throughout ... a sense of the writer, older and wiser, trying to redeem the past through understanding it better * Guardian *
A highly readable account of his early life up to the creation of Microsoft, Source Code is unusually personal and laced with self-awareness. [Gates] doesn’t hold back from admitting his own shortcomings [and] delivers a fast-paced account of the rise from programming prodigy to budding tech mogul, replete with cliffhanger moments and revealing new detail * Financial Times *
[Source Code] arrives at an unusual moment, as the tech billionaires have been unleashed. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg – their success has given them power that they are enthusiastically, even gleefully, using in divisive ways ... He is a counterpoint to the moguls in the news ... Writing an autobiography is another way Gates is different from his peers, few of whom seem so introspective * The New York Times *
Charmingly told ... Source Code isn’t so much a book about the early days of computing software as a lament to a bygone America: it’s as filled with nostalgia as Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie or Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. It immerses us fully in how it felt to be a middle-class child in the 1960s Seattle suburbs, and what it was like, a decade later, to be at the forefront of a small but world-altering technical revolution * Telegraph *
There is utility to be had … but there is also joy: the joy at marveling at genius coming into focus — confident, watchful, disciplined, exuberant, boyish and prickly — and the joy at watching a door left ajar kicked open wide. Yet the book is more than just that. Subtly, searchingly, always trusting the reader, Gates explores the mysteries of why he of all people became the Bill Gates: not only the first of the world-conquering tech titans of our era but also, in his second act, likely the best of them * Bloomberg *
A gentle, pensive autobiography ... the pleasure of this reflective book is the sense of Old Bill Gates peeking over your shoulder, as bemused by Young Bill Gates as you are * Daily Mail *
Illuminating….Very much a bildungsroman…. A human story * Wired *
A remarkably introspective and personally revealing tour through some of the key moments and experiences that shaped Gates the boy and teenage programming whiz, years before he became a business titan * San Francisco Chronicle *
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 *