Steven Levy lists his top 10 books about technology in an article on IEEE Spectrum’s website. Regarding the list, he states:
Any great nonfiction book combines education with entertainment. in drafting my A-list of general interest books about technology, I considered impact and significance but gave still more weight to the reading experience. this is a collection where lay readers can appreciate each entry – and engineers, programmers, and other tech professionals can’t afford to miss a single one.
Here is the list. Check out the article for a brief blurb about each.
- 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)
Filed under: Books, Random Nerd | Tagged: book list, Books, IEEE, spectrum, technology
