10 Great Tech Books
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
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)
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".
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.
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.
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)