
Google, at scale: A brief review of "In the Plex" (the story of Google) - gronkie
http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/google-at-scale/
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ansy
I highly recommend In the Plex to anyone on Hacker News interested in tech
folklore. I'm sure even Googlers would find stories they hadn't heard before.
The story of Google is an epic story fit for Homeric interpretation.

Steven Levy also wrote the excellent Crypto which covers the emergence of
strong public cryptography. It is not a story of accidental discovery, but
about active sabotage by the NSA and perseverance by a number of visionaries
like Whit Diffie and Martin Hellman working under the radar and outside the
mainstream.

[http://www.amazon.com/Crypto-Rebels-Government-Privacy-
Digit...](http://www.amazon.com/Crypto-Rebels-Government-Privacy-
Digital/dp/0140244328)

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cschmidt
I'm reading In the Plex right now. It is worth reading, however it doesn't
have the same spark has Steven Levy's classic book Hackers.

[http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution-
Ann...](http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution-
Anniversary/dp/1449388396)

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franze
i read it one week ago, and well ... it's in no way any different from the
thousanda other books of journalists writing about a tech company.

i would love to read a book from an (ex-)google (no, i won't call them
xooglers....) coder/hacker/dev about google, i want the gory details about the
history of go, their biggest server f*ck ups , the strangest 20% projects that
no manager ever "got", ...

"in the plex" is just another history of google, said that, it was better than
the other two books i read about the same topic and which i don't even
remember by name anymore....

