10 Great Tech Books

http://spectrum.ieee.org/jul08/6354

by paul_reiners • 18 years ago

11 7 18 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

Single Page link: http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/6354

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance - Henry Petroski (Knopf, 1989)

Mirror Worlds; or, The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox…How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean - David Gelernter (Oxford University Press, 1991)

A New Kind of Science - Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Media, 2002)

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas R. Hofstadter (Basic Books, 1979)

Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age - Paul Graham (O'Reilly, 2004)

The Design of Everyday Things - Donald A. Norman (Basic Books, 1988; paperback reprint, 2002)

The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder (Little, Brown, 1981)

The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing - David Kahn (Macmillan, 1967; revised edition, Scribner, 1996)

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time - Dava Sobel (Walker, 1995)

The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster, 1986)

rw• 18 years ago

Dark Sun - Richard Rhodes

byrneseyeview• 18 years ago

I do not understand the art. Did pictures of people reading these books really offer anything to someone reading the article?

Also, the review of H&P is the worst I've ever read. "Graham is so unabashedly geeky that, though he is a natural writer, he can't help but express himself in metaphors drawn from what he calls "his native land, hacking." (Typical sentence: "When you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low.")"

Damping oscillations is not a metaphor. It's like reviewing a book by a mathematician who is so geeky he says "Multiply it by 3" instead of "triple it" or "Times it".

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

PG's quote in context:

Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low.

I think the "oscillations" sentence is, in fact, a metaphor: The act of "playing it safe" in design is being compared to the act of damping out some wildly oscillating system. But nothing is actually oscillating here.

A less-metaphoric way of describing the situation would be "when you discard the outliers beyond one sigma, you lose the highs as well as the lows". But that would be double-plus-geeky so PG wisely didn't write that.

And, though as a former physicist I hate to have to say it... to a non-geek, a reference to damped oscillations is very geeky. Eyes will glaze over. I have seen it happen.

comatose_kid• 18 years ago

On this list, I've read the following:

Hackers & Painters

The Design of Everyday Things

The Soul of a New Machine

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who...

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

All were great books, so I should probably add the others to my 'read this' list.

evgen• 18 years ago

"A New Kind of Science" on any list of 10 great tech books!?! Puh-leeze.

wallflower• 18 years ago

Or to rephrase the title "The Top 10 books the author would bring with them to a deserted island"

Mirror Worlds. Hard to find this book but a lot of their ideas have already been adopted (e.g. Time Machine for Leopard kind of borrows their life-streaming metaphor)

10 Great Tech Books

Related Stories