Single Page link: <a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/6354" rel="nofollow">http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/6354</a><p>The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance - Henry Petroski (Knopf, 1989)<p>Mirror Worlds; or, The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox…How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean - David Gelernter (Oxford University Press, 1991)<p>A New Kind of Science - Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Media, 2002)<p>Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas R. Hofstadter (Basic Books, 1979)<p>Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age - Paul Graham (O'Reilly, 2004)<p>The Design of Everyday Things - Donald A. Norman (Basic Books, 1988; paperback reprint, 2002)<p>The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder (Little, Brown, 1981)<p>The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing - David Kahn (Macmillan, 1967; revised edition, Scribner, 1996)<p>Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time - Dava Sobel (Walker, 1995)<p>The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster, 1986)
I do not understand the art. Did pictures of people reading these books really offer anything to someone reading the article?<p>Also, the review of H&P is the worst I've ever read. "Graham is so unabashedly geeky that, though he is a natural writer, he can't help but express himself in metaphors drawn from what he calls "his native land, hacking." (Typical sentence: "When you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low.")"<p>Damping oscillations is not a metaphor. It's like reviewing a book by a mathematician who is <i>so geeky</i> he says "Multiply it by 3" instead of "triple it" or "Times it".
On this list, I've read the following:<p>Hackers & Painters<p>The Design of Everyday Things<p>The Soul of a New Machine<p>Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who...<p>The Making of the Atomic Bomb<p>All were great books, so I should probably add the others to my 'read this' list.
Or to rephrase the title "The Top 10 books the author would bring with them to a deserted island"<p>Mirror Worlds. Hard to find this book but a lot of their ideas have already been adopted (e.g. Time Machine for Leopard kind of borrows their life-streaming metaphor)