Book review: "The last lecture" by Randy Pausch

This is a review of both the book and the video of the lecture which is available online, as the two are very similar and have a lot of common material. Short background: Randy Pausch was a professor of computer science in CMU, who after finding out he has only a few months left to live (having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer) gave a lecture at his university called "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams". In this autobiographic lecture, Randy reflected on his life from the point of view of achieving dreams he dreamed as a child, and tried to provide life lessons from his own experience, both for his children and for the general public. The book was given to me as a gift, and I couldn't help checking it up online, finding out the huge amount of hype around Randy and his lecture. Needless to say, this hype raised my expectation from the book, so I ended up a little disappointed. Because all in all, while being a nice auto-biography, the book (and the lecture) is far from being the most inspiring thing I've ever read or seen. This is one of those classic cases in which having high expectations from something eventually contributes to lower enjoyment of actually experiencing it. I'm not saying it's a bad book not worth reading. It's very short and well written, so investing the couple of hours requiring in reading it is not a waste of time. All that I'm saying is don't expect too much, or you'll be disappointed.