Source Code: Bill Gates' journey from 'snotty brat' to world's richest man

"Bill Gates is the John McEnroe of the tech world," said Steven Poole in The Guardian. "Once a snotty brat whom everyone loved to hate", he is now a "beloved elder statesman" – a dedicated philanthropist who was doing "effective altruism" long before it was fashionable.

In this, the first of a planned trilogy of memoirs, the 69-year-old recounts the first two decades of his life, from his early years in a "pleasant suburb of Seattle" to the founding of Microsoft in 1975 and the agreement, two years later, to form a partnership with Apple Computer's Steve Jobs. The book is no mere "geek's inventory of early achievements". Gates expresses "genuine gratitude for influential mentors", and "strikes a wry mood of self-deprecation throughout". Explaining his decision to attend theatre classes at high school, he admits the "main draw" was the number of girls there. And unlike most "self-made" billionaires, he emphasises the "unearned privilege" of his background, with his lawyer father and teacher mother.

Gates was, he admits, hugely lucky to attend a school that, in 1968, became one of the first in the US to provide pupils with access to a computer, said Tom Knowles in The Telegraph. From the age of 13, he spent every "spare minute" at the terminal. With other pupils, including future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, he formed a programming group that was commissioned to "automate the payroll systems for local businesses and produce a new timetable for every pupil in his school".

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Moving to Harvard, he and Allen learnt that a company in New Mexico had developed the first commercially available mini-computer, said Richard Waters in the Financial Times. Realising that the race was on to write software that would make such "PC-like machines useful", Gates dropped out of Harvard and relocated to Albuquerque, where his company – at that point called "Micro-Soft" – was born.

Some episodes covered in Source Code – such as the "legal intricacies of Microsoft's negotiations with a long-defunct Seattle software firm" – really ought to have been "lost to history", said Tom Whipple in The Times. Yet at its best, the book is refreshingly frank and real. "I have never read anything that so vividly describes the pizza-fuelled shower-dodging obsessiveness" of the coder at work.

Gates is honest, too, about being a difficult child, said Ian Birrell in The Spectator. Today, he suggests, "I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum." This "surprisingly readable book" shows how he surmounted such obstacles to become "one of the key figures of our digital age".