August 28, 2008

Popular science book meme

There's a popular science book meme going around -- I first saw it on Cocktail Party Physics, where it evolved from another meme, and it's appeared other places such as Uncertain Principles. I have to say, I don't do that well in these sorts of popular science reading lists because I tend not to read so much from, say, biology or chemistry and more from computing and technology. Those lists tend to really focus on physics, chemistry, biology and math.

So, I won't bore you with lists of books I have or haven't read from these other lists. What I will do is mention a bunch that I have read and really enjoyed that are computing related, including a novel. I don't intend for this to be a meme, but please feel free to mention computing, technology or other popular science books that you've enjoyed.

  • The Bug by Ellen Ullman
  • Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents by Ellen Ullman
  • Dreaming in Code: Two dozen programmers, three years, 4,732 bugs, and one quest for transcendent software by Scott Rosenberg
  • Everything is miscellaneous by David Weinberger
  • Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations by Clay Shirky
  • Ambient findability by Peter Morville
  • Information architecture for the world wide web by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville
  • In the beginning was the command line by Neal Stephenson
  • Programmers at work, 1st series: Interviews by Susan Lammers
  • Understanding the professional programmer by Gerald M. Weinberg
  • Peopleware: Productive projects and teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
  • Decline and fall of the American programmer by Edward Yourdon
  • Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti
  • Software conflict: Essays on the art and science of software engineering by Robert L. Glass
  • The mythical man-month : Essays on software engineering by Fred Brooks
  • Out of their minds: The lives and discoveries of 15 great computer scientists by Dennis Elliot Shasha and Cathy Lazere
  • In the beginning was the command line by Neal Stephenson
  • The sachertorte algorithm: And other antidotes to computer anxiety by John Shore

1 comment:

CogSciLibrarian said...

I really enjoyed VS Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain. Now reading: John Medina's Brain Rules. Also, John Seeley Brown, the Social Life of Information (not sure how science-y it is, but it was fun for library science)