The impulse to write my first nonfiction book, Sublime Geek: Writing Fiction, Coding Software, came from my own lived experience as a novelist and sometimes a programmer.
Both professions require a daily commitment to the language, and both programmers and writers seek clarity, expressiveness, and elegance. and both subcultures produce their own value hierarchies, their own mythologies.
You are reading: Best books on how computers work
Much has been written and read about writers, but the culture that produces computing (and thus the social and political landscapes we now live in) remains largely unknown to outsiders.
here is a selection of books that offer information, which could constitute an informal anthropology and the history of computing.
1. code: the hidden language of computer hardware and software by charles petzold
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Despite being surrounded by computers, most of us have no idea how they work. In this masterful exposition, Petzold starts from first principles, showing how machines use logic to compute numbers. his writing is clear, eloquent, and entertaining, and once you’ve read the code, you’ll never again treat computers like mysterious, magical objects. An essential companion piece to Petzold’s book is James Gleick’s Information: A Story, A Theory, A Flood. gleick’s exciting history of information theory illustrates our nascent understanding of the fact that we are “information creatures” living in a universe that is also information: a “bit” – a fundamental unit of information – can be a speck magnetized on a hard drive. disc or a gene or a quantum particle. Along the way, Gleick introduces the reader to the pioneers of information theory (Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, Ada Byron) and their groundbreaking ideas.
2. the soul of a new machine by tracy kidder
Over 30 years, but still second to none as a description of the programmers they work with and the problems they tackle. Kidder watched General Data Corporation engineers and programmers build a new minicomputer in just one year; the “veterans” of the project were 35-year-olds who hired recent college grads willing to sacrifice to make the machine work. This story of epic effort, technical idealism, and managerial cynicism is repeated today in many startups.
3. hackers: heroes of the computer revolution by steven levy
The story of the heady early days of the invention of personal computing is told no better than here. Levy convincingly recreates the guerrilla actions of members of the mit tech model railroad club, who tried to liberate mainframe computing from its vigilant bureaucratic guardians and make it accessible to the masses, as well as the excitement and creativity of the home computer club, which first They met in a garage in Menlo Park in 1975 and brought together Steve Wozniak and Adam Osborne and many other scruffy eccentrics who created personal computing.
4. dreaming in code: two dozen programmers, three years, 4,732 bugs, and a quest for momentous software by scott rosenberg
one of the peculiarities of the culture of silicon valley is that failure can be a virtue, as long as one fails with honor in an attempt to create something new and learns from failure. Big software projects fail and crash more often than outsiders might guess, and Rosenberg shows the reader why. His sympathetic yet lucid depiction of the effort of a handpicked team of programmers led by Mitch Kapor (the creator of Lotus 1-2-3) to create a comprehensive personal information manager makes for a worthy modern successor to Tracy, a children’s ode to heroism and arrogance of the programmers.
5. The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise by Nathan Ensmenger
eniac, the first fully programmable computer to be put into operation, was programmed entirely by women, the famous “eniac girls”, following a tradition started by ada byron and grace hopper. However, programming, especially in the United States, has become a majority male domain; one that is riddled with sexism and weird geeky machismo. ensmenger shows how and why this might be so in his insightful and pioneering story. argues that the “masculinization of computing” was a contingent social and political process that attempted to restructure what was initially thought of as a “mechanical” administrative service -similar to those provided by secretaries or telephone operators- into a demanding service intellectual. discipline that requires intelligence and creativity. the exclusion of women from this newly reconfigured sphere was intentional: “professionalization” requires masculinization.
6. dogfight: how apple and google went to war and started a revolution by fred vogelstein
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here, hackers have grown into ruthless corporate overlords. they betray each other, they lie, they engage in endless battles over the billions of dollars at stake in mobile computing, and they “go nuclear” with patent lawsuits. vogelstein is a veteran journalist who has reported on silicon valley for decades, and his patiently cultivated sources reveal the truth behind all those choreographed product presentations that have so seduced journalists and consumers: “screaming, screaming, backstabbing, gloom.” , panic and fear”.
7. Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner
computer games are now a bigger industry than hollywood. Kushner takes the reader back to the mid-’80s, when computer games were played primarily by closeted nerds. The “two boys” of Kushner’s title are “the two Johns,” John Romero and John Carmack, who founded the aptly named ID Software and created a series of seminal games: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake. In his portrayal of the now-legendary duo and their rocky relationship, Kushner creates a vivid image of obsession, extraordinary technical skill, and creativity in the face of severe hardware limitations and a developing games industry.
8. microservants by douglas coupland
As fiction and a social document, microserfs hold up well. If you want to know what it’s like to be a common slave inside the great feudal machines of software production, and to experience the exhilaration and terror of life in a startup, this is the book to read. Similarly, Ellen Ullman’s Bug is a beautifully written novel about a programmer’s attempt to find, fix, and defeat a computer bug or error so elusive that it is given a name: “The Jester.” the protagonist’s search after this ever-disappearing and reappearing “heisenbug” becomes a poignant meditation on the effects of technology on humans.
9. the cultural novels of iain m banks
Tech fans are keenly aware of the possibilities of the future, so it’s no surprise that their favorite genre is science fiction; I myself share the general geek love for these novels. the culture is an anarchist, utopian, post-scarcity society spanning galaxies and species, which banks use to explore fundamental questions about morality, pleasure, and metaphysical meaning. read the entire sequence, but if you must choose one, start with the game player, in which life itself becomes a game.
10. turing annotated: a guided tour through alan turing’s landmark article on computability and the turing machine by charles petzold
And finally, a pick for when you’re feeling especially adventurous and curious. more often than not, we non-scientists settle for explanations of theoretical advances that are ultimately just collections of bewildering metaphors and hand gestures. In Turing Annotated, Petzold, one of the great explainers of our time, provides a dazzlingly lucid, line-by-line close reading of Turing’s famous 36-page article on computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem. At the end of Petzold’s commentary on Turing, you will understand what the Entscheidungsproblem was and you will have come into close contact with the thought that created the Turing machine and thus changed our world.
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