

10 Great Tech Books - paul_reiners
http://spectrum.ieee.org/jul08/6354

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pchristensen
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)

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rw
Dark Sun - Richard Rhodes

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byrneseyeview
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".

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mechanical_fish
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.

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

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comatose_kid
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.

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wallflower
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)

