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Slashdot Asks: What Are Your Favorite Technology Books and Novels?
It can be a nonfiction book, or a fictional narrative where technology plays a key role. I recently started to read 'The Rise of the Robots' by Martin Ford. It talks about how robots are threatening mass unemployment more than they ever did before. I also found Andrew Blum's 'Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet' quite insightful. I would like to read 'The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers'.
What are some of your favorite tech-centric books? And which book are you currently reading, or recently finished?
What are some of your favorite tech-centric books? And which book are you currently reading, or recently finished?
along with his follow-up Freedom.
Yep, that's what I said.
Neal Asher's Polity/Cormac Series starting with Gridlinked.
I like reading physics books. Many, if not most, are predictable to one degree or another but once in a while someone actually tries to resolve some of the most common and egregious physics problems. Frank Close and Lee Smolin come to mind.
I come here for the love
IMO modern sci-fi has been "dumbed" down to just action flicks. Originally, "classic" Sci-Fi dealt with the _social_ issues and problems that technology created. We got some amazing stories.
Everything by:
* Isaac Asimov -- especially Foundation series.
* Robert A. Heinlein
* Arthur C. Clarke
Is A+.
There are also plenty of Feynman videos on YouTube. Fascinating just to listen to him. He's the true skeptic -- an open mind and willing to _explore_ issues.
Buy why limit this to just novels though?? For modern decent sci-fi TV would include:
* Continuum
* Firefly
* Fringe
* Lost
* Star Trek: The Next Generation
* X-Files
Isn't that the whole point of good Sci-Fi -- to light our imagination with possibilities?
Not the "Time Travel' Deus Ex Machina so much modern sci-fi crap resorts to.
The Adolescence of P1.
- Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder - What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff
With the introduction of things like "every student gets an ipad" and young people literally not even owning a laptop, I think Stephenson's In The Beginning was the Command Line is probably his most valuable work that becomes more precious every year.
UNIX Power Tools by JPeek et al from O'Reilly. This ought to be the bible, the required reading, for anyone into UNIX or similar systems, just IMHO. I have a very worn and dog-eared copy of the 2nd edition and I still use it 16 yrs later... its that good. Absolutely timeless classic of the genre.
C|N>K
If you're just looking for something to read that is technical, the folks at Palo Alto have put together a good list of books as "canon" for the security industry. Worth a look anyway.
https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/threat-research/cybercanon
-- Don't make me replace you with a small shell script.
Although his later works (such as Anathem) felt like they went off the edge of the world, Cryptonomicon combines a clever story, a prescient look at the emerging internet age, and some thoughtful nods to encryption schemes, all in a decent story. IMHO one of his best, and a good all-round sci-fi yarn...
SICP is still around and is now under a Creative Commons license.
Martian Chronicles are at the top of my list. Maybe not exactly realistic, but a great read.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Anything by Cory Doctorow! He even gives out some free ebooks of his on his website. Cory Doctorow is full of win!
Love the approach of having a geek, socially dysfunctional girl kick the butt of the CIA or other high profile criminals / businesses with so much ease, and being so resourceful. Even though everything is not always totally realistic, I like the storyline. And I'm still looking for a way to transfer a few million from an oversea crook to my own account that I opened under a false ID too...
https://www.amazon.com/Way-Thi...
Originally published in 1988, it was one of the books that sparked my interest in engineering and science as a child. The illustrations were both fascinating and informative without being too technical, and at times funny.
Cliff Stoll's account of how he tracked the CCC hackers is a very good read.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Tracy Kidders book is most memorable.
Also, The Wages of Destruction. Best analysis of why Germany did not have the economy to win WW2, and how they tried anyway. That and mismanagement of the Luftwaffe and the DRG. Examples of how stupid leaders can pull a country down a black hole.
Can't go wrong with some Neal Stephenson. Started reading Snow Crash 2 years ago on a recommendation, just finished going through Zodiac, Diamond age, Cryptonomicom, Interface and The Baroque Cycle.
Granted, Zodiac is more an environmentalist manifesto than techno-thriller (and Baroque Cycle is more political/economical than technical), but otherwise his books are fantastic and my praise just adds to the mountain of accolades he already has.
Two of my favorite books that I've read this year were about Bell Labs (The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation) and the history of Intel (The Intel Trinity).
Stallman's Free Software, Free Society if you're too lazy to connect to gnu.org/philosophy. Say what you will, but rms is simply a legend and too important to overlook whether or not you agree or disagree with his views.
Both are absolutely first rate. Also add "The Supermen", which is a great overview of the Supercomputer industry back in its heyday.
Chaos
One of the inspirations for me in pursuing education in Chaos Theory (and applications of course).
"Dark Matter", Blake Crouch - this is really not time travel but Many Worlds of quantum physics, played out in fictional drama. Didn't really care for it. Technical parts were so-so, but mostly, too many "bad guys" ( won't give a spoiler ) kills necessary plot climax.
"Timeline" Michael Crichton - One of my favorites. Enough tech to properly suspend disbelief, coupled with good midieval historical content and great plot line. Movie sucked but book is a must-read.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
Its still Mythical after all these years and ten major releases of Microsoft Project.
http://www.localroger.com/prim... This is the best!
https://qntm.org/ra
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
By John L. Heilbron. Fascinating history and he's not afraid of using a little math - which alas too many are.
The Adolescence of P-1, by Thomas J. Ryan (1977), virus and AI set in 1974-1977 on IBM Mainframes of the day. Now get off my lawn!
Creepy futurism buried in intense action:
https://www.amazon.com/Drift-Wars-Brett-James/dp/0985086424/
Basically daunted by the topic, but I read a lot of books. Started with classic SF such as Heinlein and Asimov, but trying to pick the best is an overwhelming challenge. I do see mention of those two above, but Iain M Banks seems to be missing. His Culture books are ultimately optimistic about the future in the same way that Star Trek is. Too well written to dismiss as space opera, though grandiose enough.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I didn't think good sci-fi was getting made anymore until I came across The Expanse. The novels are terrific (especially the 5th novel) and Syfy's TV adaptation is surprisingly good as well. Both are worth a look.
The premise is a near-future sci-fi setting with as little magic tech as possible. Almost all sci-fi tech in the story consists of reasonable derivations of current technology. Newtonian physics in space is respected. There's no inertial dampeners. There are no relativity-busting star drives. Gravity in space is through rotation or constant acceleration. And the story is solid.
It's up there with BSG and Firefly in terms of emphasis on depicting space realistically (by comparison to the looser realism of Star Trek/Farscape/Stargate/etc anyway). I still enjoy BSG's and Firefly's stories and characters a bit more, but The Expanse is far superior in terms of scientific accuracy.
Notably, for any Game of Thrones fans out there, George RR Martin is a fan of The Expanse and it is frequently referred to as the Game of Thrones of sci-fi.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
By Douglas Hofstadter.
It's a unique work regarding tech because of its absence. The entire society could have incredible technology, but they choose not to. It's Amish, for lack of a better way of describing it. They know it exists, but they decided that they didn't want it. With only a few exceptions. Dibs and dabs of incredible tech such as interstellar travel and sheilding technology and poison snoopers, but for the most part they eschew the rest and try to develop people rather than machines. A totally unique approach to technology in the future. What if it gets bigger than we're comfortable with, and we simply decide to do away with it for our own good? I think Frank Herbert was the first person to really explore that question in depth.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Silver Metal Lover, by Tanith Lee. Human and android fall in love and deal with that, and regular life in a typical urban setting. Lots of social-issue philosophising underneath the solid characters and romance.
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
just came out.
My favorite book
The mere fact of confessing you're actually engaging in the practice of "reading books" (where book != text meant to instruct and indoctrinate the reader into accepting their socioeconomic condition and conform) is enough to brand you a subversive and put you on a watchlist. Feign ignorance! It's the only way to be safe.
I really enjoyed Eric Drexler's seminal work, "Engines of Creation," even if he was off the mark about timelines and how nanotech would evolve. Philip Ball's "Designing the Molecular World" is enlightening too.
"It's a good computer... for I to BM on!" - apologies to Triumph, the insult comic dog
When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, by Cory Doctorow. It has an interesting take on the chaos of something catastrophic happening, and the human condition. That's as far as I can go without spoilers...
GPL and its sequels LGPL and AGPL by GNU
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
The most in-depth and compelling examination of the possible manner in which strong AI can arise and the consequences that I am aware of. Very well written, argued, and thought through.
https://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0198739834/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1473715473&sr=8-1&keywords=superintelligence
Don't be fooled from the innocent aspect: as it has been pointed out by the first reviewer, this book gives through allegories a dramatized explaination of UNIX networking. Highly recommeded! This nice book has been reviewed here on Slashdot some time ago.
That is all.
It is the story of the developer of the checkers program that beat the world champion and the story of the matches between them.
A very interesting read.
An entertaining book on Richard Feynman's pranks and interests.
True Names is an amazingly prescient work.
It clearly presents full-blown world-wide Internetworking, Virtual Reality, A.I. agents, hacker/cracker cabals, cyberwarfare, and a number of other important concepts (one of which I won't mention to avoid a major spoiler) - as the fundamental and necessary background for a rollicking good story.
Published in 1981!
So (much like Star Trek communicators inspiring the clamshell cellphone), True Names may have actually inspired and/or helped define the form of some of the key components of today's information technology.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Oops - logged in now. Please read!
Teaser available here.
All the IPv6 books from O'Reilly & Associates. Also, an old favorite of mine - Unix Haters' Handbook
Iain M. Banks
And not literary sophistication, right?
If we're talking pure joy of tech, for me it has to be EE Doc Smith's SPACEHOUNDS OF THE IPC, originally published in Hugo Gernsback's AMAZING STORIES in 1931.
Now remember for readers in 1931 radio was high tech. Ever build a crystal radio set? Did you wonder what the point was? Well if you were a kid in the early 20s, with a wooden plank, a spool of wire, and a hunk of galena, you could build yourself the most advanced, high tech communication instrument on the planet. When the story was published in 1931, the hottest new tech was the vacuum tube radio. This took a few more premanunfactured parts -- the vacuum tubes obviousl, but still if you were ambitious and clever with your hands and could solder wires and cut and bend sheet metal, you still could build the most sophisticated communication receiver on the planet.
The story takes place in a high tech future that seems plausible for someone in '31. There is regular spaceliner service between Earth and Mars. Interesting side note -- these spaceliners operate by a kind of remotely broadcasted power, and use that to power their reactionless drives. If you were *very* sophisticated at the time, you would realize this avoids all the rocket equation related implausibilities of ships that have to carry the reaction mass to maintain constant acceleration. The ships are guided by beacon stations (radio of course!), but the station keepers have been getting sloppy, so the line sends their best computer (a *person* of course!) to pin their ears back.
The liner is attacked by an alien spaceship, cut apart, and towed in pieces to Jupiter.It is built in many small airtight compartments (like an OCEAN liner) so most of the people are still alive, including our hero who is stuck in small piece with a beautiful (yay) rich (double yay) girl. He manages to escape (I forget how), and they crash on Ganymede, which turns out to be just like Earth but with lower gravity.
Now here's the problem: the line is building a new supership; if they only knew everyone was being held at the moons of Jupiter they could rescue them. But as far as they know the liner just disappeared.
So what our hero and is lovely, plucky helpmate must do is something familiar to every red-blooded Depression era nerd: BUILD A RADIO SET! Only they've got nothing; they've got to work their way up from paleolithic tech all the way up to (their) present, figuring out how to smelt metal, blow glass, generate electricity, and reverse engineer the very latest high tech vacuum tube.
This kind of story represents a way of imagining the future of tech that we we never be able to believe in again; one in which a single heroically brilliant nerd can really master everything from banging the rocks together all the way up to the very cutting edge. You can imagine the hero of this book figuring out how to melt silica and blow glass, but you couldn't imagine him improvising a chip fab.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
My favorite new tech book is Rationality from AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
https://intelligence.org/ratio...
(or as a usable but not always perfect TeX document: https://github.com/jrincayc/ra... )
The Commodore 64 User's Guide - taught me my first programming language.
The Commodore 64 Technical reference guide - a riveting sequel.
Which is also science and passion.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
"The Adolescence of P-1" by Thomas J. Ryan - a good read, even today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!
In non fiction, Horowitz & Hill: The Art of Electronics. I got the third edition recently (the only edition I own) and it's just fantastic! Mackay's information theory and inference book is also a great fireside read. Despite it's many detractors, I've always been partial to numerical recipes as well. All those three are great books in a conversational style aimed at technical types but without assuming any particular expertise in the field.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Spook Country by William Gibson (fiction)
Dragnet Nation by Julia Angwin (non-fiction)
also...
Under A Green Sky by Peter D. Ward, Ph. D.
This one is paleontology, non-fiction about the greenhouse effect and the Permian extinction. A good read!
by Richard Rhodes
The Books by William Gibson and Neal Stephenson make for good technology novels and giving some insights into the present and near future.
From Gibson I'd recommend the Bridge Triology and the Neuromancer/Sprawl Triology.
From Neal Stepheson I'd recommend Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and Reamde.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The Difference Engine by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling
In the Beginning... Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson
Mother Earth Mother Board - https://www.wired.com/1996/12/... also by Neal Stephenson (actually, anything by him)
The Victorian Internet is also worth reading.
Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done?
by Kurt Vonnegut
Yes, I found Daemon and Freedom great books.
Kill Decision - makes me think about autonomous decisions and really fits with what society is thinking doing now.
Negroponte's Being Digital . It was assigned reading in college. I thought it was incredibly interesting. It predicted the rise of voice-controlled personal assistants like siri or cortana that can help you do things you could do in person like send a text message.
Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick
Was nonfiction a nono? Well, then: Tracy KIdder: Soul of a New machine
Neal Stephenson's SnowCrash and of Course William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy- Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, and Count Zero
I try to update this regularly.
* The Hyperion series by Dan Simmons is AMAZING. I think my favorite.
* The Martian by Andy Wier. MacGyver on Mars. What's not to love? Actually pretty technically accurate, near-future Mars mission goes bad, one crew member is left for dead and stranded.
* Peter Watts writes some good hard scifi...the Rifters series is pretty awesome, dealing with psychologically damaged people whose trauma makes them adapted for deep-sea work, and Blindsight, which has a crew led by a genetically resurrected vampire on a spacecraft off to visit a recently detected distant object. I wasn’t so much a fan of the follow-up to Blindsight though (Echopraxia).
* Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan is some great cyberpunk noir. There are two more books with the same main character (Broken Angels and Woken Furies) but I think the first one is the best.
* The Laundry Files series by Charles Stross. British humor/Lovecraftian horror. The main character is a systems administrator/necromancer for a secret British government agency that deals with the nightmares beyond reality.
* Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise, also by Charles Stross, but these are hard scifi rather than comedy/horror.
* Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. Not scifi, urban fantasy, but fun reads.
* William Gibson pretty much defines cyberpunk...Neuromancer, and the Sprawl trilogy are pretty much required reading.
* Then if William Gibson didn't take himself so seriously, you would get Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson. The main character is named Hiro Protagonist...yeah, it gets sillier from there. But it's a fantastic read, one of my favorites. Also: Diamond Age (nanotechnology future), Cryptonomicon (contemporary treasure hunt/crypto/startup), Seveneves (near future apocalypse)
* Mira Grant's Feed series, because who doesn't love zombies. Avoid the Parasitology series though, gargantuan plot holes I couldn’t get past.
* The Zones of Thought books by Vernor Vinge are darn good. A Deepness in the Sky, and A Fire Upon the Deep. Same universe, different storylines and characters though.
* Eon by Greg Bear is good. Starts out vaguely Rama-esque, but changes up quite a bit shortly in.
* Foundation series by Asimov, classics. Also I, Robot (just pretend the movie didn’t happen)
* Little Brother by Cory Doctorow is a subversive YA novel that I couldn't tear myself away from and read in a single sitting. Also see the sequel, Homeland.
* Along the subversive vein, Daemon and Freedom(TM) by Daniel Suarez.
* Pretty much anything from Philip K. Dick. He wrote about insanity quite well, because he himself was crazy.
* Peter F. Hamilton writes some pretty fluffy space opera stuff, it's fun if you don't look at it too deeply.
* Space Eldritch and Space Eldritch II are collections of short Lovecraftian scifi horror stories. Some GREAT stuff in there. I wish a few of them were fleshed out into full novels or series.
* Signal To Noise and A Signal Shattered by Eric S. Nylund, nice hard scifi.
* Kiln People by David Brin, interesting thoughts about continuity of self by copying your consciousness into 24-hour expiring clay golems and downloading their memories back to your real body after.
* Dune (Frank Herbert). Far-future scifi wrapped around a deep core of political intrigue.
* The Expanse series (James S.A. Corey), some good conspiracy-driven space opera that actually mostly pays attention to physics.
Not really sharp, no.