[5] In February of the same year, Pilgrim, Blumenthal, Randall Johnson, and Eric Sooros uploaded the games from Cornell's Upson Hall computer lab to a public server at Stanford University.

The four used false mainframe accounts created by Blumenthal, then also a CIT employee [6] The virus caused disruption to Macintosh computers internationally.

[8] Sooros was granted immunity from prosecution in return for his grand jury testimony against Pilgrim, Johnson, and Blumenthal.

[9] In September 1992, Pilgrim and Blumenthal pled guilty and were later sentenced to 520 hours of community service, forfeiture of seized computer equipment, and payment of nearly $2,500 in restitution to Cornell and other affected parties.

[12][13] Much of the book consists of example programs with annotations and explanatory text, and it generally describes how to modify an example to serve new purposes.

Other topics covered include object oriented programming, documentation, unit testing, and accessing and parsing HTML and XML.

[19] Commenting on the event, a writer for The Economist wrote that the concern showed for Pilgrim's well-being demonstrated that "the internet, often mocked as impersonal and uncaring, can be quite the reverse.