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The Bookshelf

Abstract

The books that the articles in this encyclopedia lean on, and the ones a reader should go to next. The list is selective: narrative histories and memoirs first, because they carry the scenes and quotes that a reference article cannot; a few technical books that changed how programmers think; and the novels that gave computing its vocabulary. Each entry gives author and year, one or two sentences on what the book does that nothing else does, and the article where its subject is covered.

Selection

A book is here because it is the standard account of its subject, or because it is the primary source (a participant’s memoir), or because it shaped the field’s self-image. Textbooks are limited to the handful that became cultural objects. Years are first-edition years.

Origins and Foundations

  • Alan Turing: The Enigma (Andrew Hodges, 1983). The biography that recovered Turing for the general reader and, through the 2014 film it inspired, for everyone else; still the standard account. → Alan Turing and the Enigma
  • Turing’s Cathedral (George Dyson, 2012). Von Neumann’s IAS machine told from the Institute’s own files; the origin of the stored-program computer as an institutional story. → John von Neumann
  • Computer: A History of the Information Machine (Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, 1996). The one-volume academic history, from Babbage to the web; the book to read for the argument that computing is an office-machine story before it is a science story. → Herman Hollerith and the Punched Card
  • The Victorian Internet (Tom Standage, 1998). The telegraph as the first online world: hackers, romances, and fraud on the wires of the 1850s. → Data Communication Prehistory
  • Crystal Fire (Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, 1997). The transistor at Bell Labs, and the three men who could not stand each other; the source for most retellings of December 1947. → The Transistor
  • The Idea Factory (Jon Gertner, 2012). Bell Labs as an institution: how a regulated monopoly bought the twentieth century’s most productive research campus. → Bell Labs: The Idea Factory
  • A Mind at Play (Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, 2017). The first full biography of Claude Shannon, juggling and unicycles included. → Claude Shannon and Information Theory
  • The Chip (T. R. Reid, 1984). Kilby and Noyce, the two inventions of the integrated circuit, and the patent fight between them. → Jack Kilby and the Integrated Circuit
  • The Man Behind the Microchip (Leslie Berlin, 2005). Robert Noyce’s biography, from the Fairchild founding to Intel to the “mayor of Silicon Valley”. → Robert Noyce and Fairchild Semiconductor
  • The Computer Boys Take Over (Nathan Ensmenger, 2010). How programming became a profession, and how it became a male one; the social history behind the software crisis. → The Software Crisis
  • Programmed Inequality (Mar Hicks, 2017). Britain discarding its women computer operators and losing its computing industry in the same decades. → The UK Computing Industry
  • Broad Band (Claire L. Evans, 2018). The women of the internet’s prehistory, from the ENIAC programmers to the early web. → Women in Computing
  • Hidden Figures (Margot Lee Shetterly, 2016). The Black women mathematicians of NACA and NASA, and the arrival of the IBM machines that replaced human computers. → Women in Computing

The Machines and the Labs

  • The Soul of a New Machine (Tracy Kidder, 1981). A Data General team builds the Eclipse MV/8000 under a deadline; the Pulitzer-winning book that taught outsiders what engineering felt like from inside. → Route 128
  • The Supermen (Charles J. Murray, 1997). Seymour Cray and the men who built the fastest machines in the world, mostly in Chippewa Falls. → Seymour Cray and Supercomputing
  • Dealers of Lightning (Michael A. Hiltzik, 1999). Xerox PARC: the Alto, Smalltalk, the laser printer, and the company that gave most of it away. → The Xerox PARC Revolution
  • The Dream Machine (M. Mitchell Waldrop, 2001). J.C.R. Licklider and the ARPA money that funded interactive computing and the network. → J.C.R. Licklider and the Intergalactic Network
  • Where Wizards Stay Up Late (Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, 1996). The building of ARPANET, BBN’s IMPs, and the first message; the standard narrative source, cited throughout this vault. → ARPANET: Building the Network
  • The Friendly Orange Glow (Brian Dear, 2017). PLATO at Illinois: plasma screens, message boards, and multiplayer games a decade before anyone else. → PLATO and the Birth of Online Community
  • Show-Stopper! (G. Pascal Zachary, 1994). Dave Cutler’s team builds Windows NT; the best account of a large software project from the inside since Kidder. → Dave Cutler and Windows NT
  • Dreaming in Code (Scott Rosenberg, 2007). Mitch Kapor’s Chandler project fails slowly over three years; why software is still hard. → The Software Crisis
  • Racing the Beam (Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, 2009). The Atari 2600 explained through its games and its brutal hardware constraints; the founding book of platform studies. → Nolan Bushnell and Atari

The Personal Computer and the Valley

  • Fire in the Valley (Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, 1984). The first history of the personal computer, written while the participants still remembered; the source of the Homebrew Computer Club as legend. → The Personal Computing Explosion
  • Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Steven Levy, 1984). MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club, the hardware hackers, the game hackers, and the Hacker Ethic that Levy extracted from them. → The Hacker Culture
  • Accidental Empires (Robert X. Cringely, 1992). The PC industry as farce, by the columnist who watched it; opinionated and quotable. → The Personal Computing Explosion
  • Hard Drive (James Wallace and Jim Erickson, 1992). The first serious Gates biography, written before the antitrust case. → Bill Gates and Microsoft
  • Insanely Great (Steven Levy, 1994). The Macintosh and its makers; the book that named the Mother of All Demos. → The Macintosh
  • Revolution in the Valley (Andy Hertzfeld, 2004). The Macintosh team’s stories, told by a member of it, from the folklore.org site. → The Macintosh
  • Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson, 2011). The authorized biography, published weeks after Jobs died; the account most later writing argues with. → Steve Jobs and Apple
  • Only the Paranoid Survive (Andrew S. Grove, 1996). Grove on the strategic inflection point, and on walking Intel out of the memory business. → Andy Grove and Intel
  • Regional Advantage (AnnaLee Saxenian, 1994). Why Silicon Valley beat Route 128; the standard theory of how technology regions work. → Route 128
  • The Innovator’s Dilemma (Clayton Christensen, 1997). Disk drives as the case study for disruptive technology; the book every incumbent in this encyclopedia failed to read in time. → The Storage Revolution
  • Chip War (Chris Miller, 2022). Semiconductors as geopolitics, from Fairchild to TSMC and the export controls. → The Semiconductor Race

The Web and the Platforms

  • In the Plex (Steven Levy, 2011). Google from the inside, with access; the search company becoming the advertising company. → Google: The Company
  • The Everything Store (Brad Stone, 2013). Amazon from bookstore to AWS. → Jeff Bezos and Amazon
  • The Master Switch (Tim Wu, 2010). Every information industry, from telephone to radio to film, has gone from open to closed; the cycle, and whether the internet escapes it. → The Rise of the Tech Giants
  • The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff, 2018). The behavioral-data economy named and indicted. → Surveillance Capitalism
  • Weapons of Math Destruction (Cathy O’Neil, 2016). Algorithms in sentencing, hiring, and lending, and who they hurt. → AI Ethics and Algorithmic Bias
  • Chaos Monkeys (Antonio García Martínez, 2016). A startup sold to Twitter, a job at Facebook, and the Valley’s money culture described by someone who took it. → Venture Capital and Silicon Valley
  • Bad Blood (John Carreyrou, 2018). Theranos: the reporting that took down a $9 billion fraud; the case study in what “fake it till you make it” costs when the product is a blood test. → Outlaws and Provocateurs
  • Zero to One (Peter Thiel with Blake Masters, 2014). Competition is for losers; the Valley’s most quoted contrarian argument. → Peter Thiel and the PayPal Mafia

Hackers, Crime, and Security

  • The Cuckoo’s Egg (Clifford Stoll, 1989). A 75-cent accounting error leads to KGB-paid hackers; the book that taught a generation what an intrusion looks like from the defender’s chair. → The KGB Hack
  • Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (Katie Hafner and John Markoff, 1991). Mitnick, Pengo, and Robert Morris, three portraits of the first hacker generation to be prosecuted. → Robert Tappan Morris
  • The Hacker Crackdown (Bruce Sterling, 1992). Operation Sundevil, the Steve Jackson Games raid, and the founding of the EFF, by a novelist who released the book free online. → The Digital Rights Movement
  • Exploding the Phone (Phil Lapsley, 2013). The phone phreaks, the blue box, and AT&T’s war on them; the definitive account. → John Draper
  • Ghost in the Wires (Kevin D. Mitnick, 2011). Mitnick’s own version of the manhunt; read against Hafner and Markoff. → Kevin Mitnick
  • Countdown to Zero Day (Kim Zetter, 2014). Stuxnet, dissected: the first cyberweapon that broke physical machinery. → The History of Cyberwar
  • Sandworm (Andy Greenberg, 2019). Russia’s GRU hackers, NotPetya, and the attacks on Ukraine’s grid. → The History of Cyberwar

Software and Its Craft

  • The Mythical Man-Month (Fred Brooks, 1975). OS/360’s manager explains why adding people to a late project makes it later; the most read and least obeyed book in software engineering. → Fred Brooks and the Mythical Man-Month
  • The Art of Computer Programming (Donald Knuth, 1968 onward). Unfinished after fifty years, and the standard against which every algorithms text is measured. → Donald Knuth and the Art of Programming
  • The C Programming Language (Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, 1978). K&R: the book that defined a language and the terse style in which programmers describe their work. → Brian Kernighan and the Unix Tools
  • Gödel, Escher, Bach (Douglas Hofstadter, 1979). Self-reference, formal systems, and consciousness, in dialogues; the book that sent a generation into computer science. → Gödel and the Incompleteness Theorems
  • Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman, 1985). The “Wizard Book”: MIT’s introduction to programming as a way of thinking, in Scheme. → John McCarthy and LISP
  • Peopleware (Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, 1987). Productive projects are about people and their rooms, not tools; the case against the open-plan office, made in 1987. → The Software Crisis
  • Design Patterns (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides, 1994). The Gang of Four’s 23 patterns, and the vocabulary that followed. → Design Patterns and the Gang of Four
  • The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Eric S. Raymond, 1999). The essay that explained Linux’s development model to business and coined Linus’s law. → The Open Source Movement
  • The Pragmatic Programmer (Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, 1999). The craft-of-programming handbook of the agile generation. → The Agile Revolution
  • Code (Charles Petzold, 1999). From flashlights and Morse code to a working processor, without skipping a step. → The Von Neumann Architecture
  • Hackers & Painters (Paul Graham, 2004). Essays on Lisp, startups, and why programmers are makers; by the co-founder of Y Combinator. → Robert Tappan Morris
  • Coders at Work (Peter Seibel, 2009). Fifteen programmers, Knuth to Fitzpatrick, interviewed about how they actually work. → Donald Knuth and the Art of Programming

Games

  • Masters of Doom (David Kushner, 2003). Carmack and Romero, id Software, and the shareware model that launched Doom. → John Carmack
  • Console Wars (Blake J. Harris, 2014). Sega of America against Nintendo, 1990 to 1996, from Tom Kalinske’s side. → Sega
  • Blood, Sweat, and Pixels (Jason Schreier, 2017). Ten games and the crunch that made them; how modern game development actually goes. → The Video Game Industry

AI

  • Genius Makers (Cade Metz, 2021). Hinton, LeCun, Bengio, and the deep-learning boom as a story of people and acquisitions. → Geoffrey Hinton and Deep Learning
  • The Second Machine Age (Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, 2014). The economists’ case that software automation is different from what came before. → Automation and the Future of Work

Fiction That Named Things

  • Neuromancer (William Gibson, 1984). The novel that made “cyberspace” (coined in his 1982 story “Burning Chrome”) a household word, written on a 1927 Hermes 2000 manual typewriter by a man who had never owned a computer. → Computing in Popular Culture
  • Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson, 1992). The Metaverse, avatars, and the pizza-delivery Mafia; the novel Silicon Valley kept trying to build. → Dead End: VRML and the First Metaverse
  • Daemon (Daniel Suarez, 2006). A dead programmer’s distributed process takes over the world; the thriller that got the technology right. → Computing in Popular Culture

📚 Sources

Bibliographic data (author, first publication year) verified against the following catalogue entries: