Posted on 12/10/2009 7:16:07 PM PST by thecodont
Ever find out one of your friends hasn’t read “Neuromancer” or doesn’t know what a Babelfish is or why it’s important to keep a towel handy at all times? Did you have that brief moment where you thought, “Man, it’s like I don’t even know you?”
If you’re gonna work in tech, write code, or just spend way too much time on Engadget, Lifehacker, and BoingBoing, there’s a certain amount of reading that goes with the territory. And I’m not just talking about O’Reilly books here. Discovering “Snow Crash” or geeking out on crypto history teaches us part of the language we all share in tech. (Plus, it’s just really fun.)
From classic sci-fi to programming bibles and productivity hacks, we’ve collected the best of the best. See how many of the 50 Books Every Geek Should Read you’ve polished off, or pick your favorite category and start working your way through the rest. And be sure to let us know if we’ve missed any.
(Excerpt) Read more at insidetech.monster.com ...
A lot of full-on geeks don’t have time for fiction.
Cool.
I remember reading Neuromancer back in the early 90’s in a single night while waiting all night in a line, outside in freezing weather.
“Snow Crash,” Neal Stephenson
“Neuromancer,” William Gibson
“I, Robot,” Isaac Asimov
*
“Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Douglas Adams
“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Philip K. Dick
“Ender’s Game,” Orson Scott Card
“The Time Machine,” H.G. Wells
*
“Microserfs,” Doug Coupland
“Flatland,” Edwin A. Abbott
“1984,” George Orwell
“Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley
“iCon,” Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon
“iWoz,” Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith
“Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire,” Jim Erickson
“The Visual Display of Quantitative Information,” Edward Tufte
“Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability,” Steve Krug
“The Non-Designer’s Design Book,” Robin Williams
“Tog on Interface,” Bruce Tognazzini
“User Interface Design for Programmers,” Joel Spolsky
“Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made,” Andy Hertzfeld
“The Soul of a New Machine,” Tracy Kidder
“Where Wizards Stay Up Late,” Hafner and Lyon
*
“Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age,” Michael A. Hiltzik
“The Cuckoo’s Egg,” Cliff Stoll
“The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness,” Steven Levy
“Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time,” Dava Sobel
“The Code Book,” Simon Singh
“Cryptonomicon,” Neal Stephenson
“Crypto,” Steven Levy
“The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master,” Andrew Hunt, David Thomas
“Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction,” Steve McConnell
“Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software,” Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John M. Vlissides
“Dreaming in Code,” Scott Rosenberg
“The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering,” Frederick P. Brooks
“Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think,” Andy Oram
“Cathedral and the Bazaar,” Eric S. Raymond
“The Long Tail,” Chris Anderson
“The Future of Ideas,” Lawrence Lessig
“On Intelligence,” Jeff Hawkins
*
“In the Beginning was the Command Line,” Neal Stephenson
“Code: Version 2.0,” Lawrence Lessig
“The Wisdom of Crowds,” James Surowiecki
“The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology,” Ray Kurzweil
“Gödel, Escher, Bach,” Douglas Hofstadter
“Gut Feelings,” Gerd Gigerenzer
“A Brief History of Time,” Stephen Hawking
“Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age,” Paul Graham
“The Evolution of Useful Things,” Henry Petroski
“Getting Things Done,” David Allen
“Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better,” Gina Trapani
“A lot of full-on geeks don’t have time for fiction.”
Their kind are techies, not geeks.
The ultimate books for a programmer?
Ulysses, followed by Finnegan’s Wake.
Well, you are supposed to be clever and well-educated....
Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox
Geeks who run wild for ten years and land a man on the frickin' moon. Best book on the subject.
We could come up with our own list.
I’m surprised I didn’t see:
The Macintosh Way, Guy Kawasaki (and a bunch of other titles by him, maybe including The Art of the Start, though I haven’t read it)
A Whack on the Side of the Head, Roger Von Oech, Nolan Bushnell, and George Willett
Atlas Shrugged is a terrible book. Anyone who wants "to go Galt" shouldn't need a book to tell them what to do.
Those are both awful. Hated them 40 years ago and my attitude toward them hasn’t changed one bit. Over rated.
I would start with The Iliad and The Odyssey, oh I thought that said Greeks.
Well, I’ve read 10 out of 11 of the SF books (all but Microserfs).
But I’ll pass on most of the rest.
“The Inmates Are Running The Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy And How To Restore The Sanity” - Alan Cooper
“The Frozen Keyboard: Living With Bad Software” - Boris Beizer
It's not an instruction manual, doofus.
Ah, the dragon book!
Bookmarking!
“An Introduction to the Physics and Chemistry of Petroleum”, Robert Richard Francis Kinghorn
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