Source Code: My Beginnings

This was a wonderful book. More than I expected. Easy read, but hit all emotions. I looked forward to reading every page. Plus, so much I didn’t know, even though much has been written about B. Gates (I’d never been a huge fan). The childhood he describes makes you yearn both for that magical time before adulthood and before the technological boom he was about to experience. So many experiences kids don’t have today. But, it goes beyond his childhood. This book makes you realize how deep childhood and young adult friendships can influence what you become. Written with humor, sensitivity, and insight learned from his past, he makes you feel the laughs, tears, and excitement. Excitement for a computer boom these young kids felt was coming, but really had no idea how big it would become. I highly recommend.

Captivating and well written. Bill Gates intertwines his growth and development of Microsoft and the history of the personal computer. This is a great inside look at the man who changed the world and brought technology to the masses. This truly brought back memories of Xerox, Apple, Radio Shack TRS-80 and much more. It was a fun and inspiring journey down memory lane to the time when memory was expensive. This book really made me feel like I know Bill Gates! Thanks for writing it Bill!

I stayed up until 4 a m. to read this book on my Amazon Kindle. It's interesting and very well written and edited. Tells about Bill Gates's early years. His childhood, his upbringing, his grandparents, his friends and their hiking adventures, how his parents met, competitive family card games led by his maternal grandmother, trouble adjusting to school, conflicts with his parents, especially his mother, and even being sent to therapy. Then there is learning about and doing computer programming from private Lakeside School in Seattle to Harvard, followed by starting Microsoft. There is a little too much detail about the small stuff and starting the business. But overall it's a very personable story. I started reading it as soon as I got the download. I liked it immediately and didn't stop for six or seven hours. Not a book I expected from a computer geek. This book is about Gates's early years and has a lot of human interest. Gates even writes that today he might have been diagnosed as autistic. And he notes that sometimes he made obnoxious and inappropriate comments, had little social interactions and was most comfortable in his own mind. His parents tried to control him to no avail, causing him to rebel. As a reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in the late 1980s, I covered Gates and Microsoft, as well as Boeing, in the early days. Gates seemed like a self-absorbed jerk and geek in those days. But mostly I recall his predicting there would be a computer in every office and eventually in every home. No one believed him. At that time people were just trying to figure out what a computer could do. Gates would eventually build a giant company and an industry, followed by fighting diseases around the world with his foundation. But the story of that will have to wait for two sequel books he is planning. Meanwhile, I recommend reading this interesting book about his early beginnings. An argument could be made to put it all into one large book. Hopefully he will do the sequels he plans on running Microsoft and on tackling world problems of climate, diseases and education with his foundation.

The first of a planned trilogy, this book was very well-written and a fascinating story. I think what I admired the most was Gates's ability to capture the voices of his mother's "precocious brat" (approximately 7 years old), the socially insecure and very rebellious teenager, and the cocky but secretly unsure college student. The book ends with the founding of the startup Micro-Soft. More to come, the author promises, and I can hardly wait.In today's world, Gates would have been been instantly diagnosed as being "somewhere on the spectrum." But he was blessed with extraordinary parents and a therapist (a very interesting part of the book) who helped the family negotiate a peace, and let Gates become who he is. Lots of good life lessons in this one.

Sabah Fatima here, as a woman who pursued an MPH because of the impact the Gates Foundation specifically both Bill and Melinda have done tremendous work for Global Health and I was super excited to finish this book. Bill Gates’ Source Code is more than a memoir—it’s a rare intellectual blueprint of one of the most influential minds of our time. With a level of candor that is both unexpected and refreshing, Gates dissects the forces that shaped his thinking, from his early curiosity to the defining moments that propelled him to revolutionize technology and philanthropy.What sets this book apart is its profound self-awareness. Gates doesn’t just recount events; he analyzes them, extracting lessons on innovation, resilience, and the complexity of human ambition. His reflections on success, failure, and reinvention are not just personal—they’re universally instructive, offering insights that extend far beyond the tech world.For those who seek more than just inspiration—for those who crave understanding of how visionaries are made—Source Code is essential reading. It’s a compelling reminder that intelligence is not just about knowledge, but about how we apply curiosity, adaptability, and self-reflection to the world around us.