I think this guide has a good place for children who are interested in computers and get in trouble for messing with their schools network. Many of these kids will have absorbed media which does not really understand the diffrence between being a software engineer and breaking into computers. They may not know about the FOSS/unix world. I think giving this to them would do them a lot of good.

My main problem with it is that ESR is unable to differentiate between being a good programmer and being ESR.

Really what we need is a guide written by a prominent member of the FOSS community who can show budding programmers what's out there in modern FOSS(this was written in 1996) without couching it in language designed to sate the author's ego.