Technology and Computing

Software, hardware, networks, the internet and the wider history and practice of technology and engineering. Read by engineers, product people and readers tracking how technology reshapes everything else.

690 books

Books 690

David McCullough · 1977 · The Panama Canal: chokepoint economics and what building one costs.
Tracy Kidder · 1981 · Pulitzer-winning account of building a minicomputer against the clock
Thomas P. Hughes · 1983 · The classic history of electrification as a system business.
Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman · 1985 · The classic computer science text on abstraction and program structure
Richard Rhodes · 1986 · The origin of the industry and its physics, told definitively.
Ben R. Rich, Leo Janos · 1994 · Insider account of Lockheed's advanced projects unit.
Carl Shapiro, Hal R. Varian · 1998 · Lock-in, switching costs and versioning; still the sharpest account of information economics.
Michael A. Hiltzik · 1999 · The definitive history of PARC and the dawn of the computer age.
Eric S. Raymond · 1999 · The essay collection that made the commercial case for open development.
David Kushner · 2003 · id Software, shareware distribution and the engine-licensing model.
Andreas M. Antonopoulos · 2014 · The technical reference for how the protocol actually works.
Nathaniel Popper · 2015 · The standard origin history of bitcoin and its early holders.
David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee · 2016 · The economics of multi-sided markets, from village markets to card networks.
Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Sangeet Paul Choudary · 2016 · The standard text on network effects, governance and platform pricing.
Eric Berger · 2021 · The Falcon 1 years and the four launches that nearly ended the company.
Norbert Wiener · 1948
J. E. Gordon · 1981 · Why materials and structures hold; engineering reasoning made intuitive
T. R. Reid · 1984 · Origins of the integrated circuit and the industry structure it created.
Douglas K. Smith, Robert C. Alexander · 1988 · How Xerox invented the personal computer and then ignored it.
Steven Levy · 1994 · The making of the Macintosh, written close to the events.
G. Pascal Zachary · 1994 · The building of Windows NT; a classic of software-project reporting.
Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon · 1996 · ARPA computing research, the funding culture PARC was staffed from.
Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson · 1997 · The transistor at Bell Labs and the birth of the information age.
Geoffrey A. Moore, Paul Johnson, Tom Kippola · 1998 · Technology growth investing framed around platform winners; a period piece worth reading as one.
Carliss Y. Baldwin, Kim B. Clark · 1999 · The modularity theory that makes contract manufacturing possible at all.
Kevin G. Rivette, David Kline · 1999 · The book that turned dormant patent portfolios into a revenue line.
Michael Lewis · 1999 · OL lists title as 'New New Thing, The'
Geoffrey A. Moore · 2000 · Managing shareholder value through technology discontinuities
Linus Torvalds, David Diamond · 2001 · Torvalds on why he gave the kernel away, and what that created.
Glyn Moody · 2001 · The reporting history of Linux and the businesses built around it.
M. Mitchell Waldrop · 2001 · Licklider and the ARPA lineage that staffed and shaped PARC.
John Cassidy · 2002 · The bubble that made and unmade Yahoo's valuation.
Annabelle Gawer, Michael A. Cusumano · 2002 · Intel, Microsoft, Cisco and the levers a platform owner pulls on its ecosystem.
Adam B. Jaffe, Josh Lerner · 2004 · How the patent system drifted from incentive to tax.
Steven Weber · 2004 · Political economy of production without conventional property.
John Battelle · 2005 · Google set inside the wider history of search and the database of intentions.
David S. Evans, Andrei Hagiu, Richard Schmalensee · 2006 · Software platforms as the multi-sided engines under other industries.
Chris Anderson · 2006 · Why unlimited shelf space moves demand into the tail
Dan Breznitz · 2007 · Compares Israel, Taiwan and Ireland; the serious analysis behind Start-Up Nation.
Nicholas G. Carr · 2008 · Computing as a utility; the argument that anticipated the cloud model.
T2 Free
Chris Anderson · 2009 · Cross-subsidy and zero marginal cost; the popular case for free tiers.
Ken Auletta · 2009 · Google seen from the media industries it disrupted.
David Kirkpatrick · 2010 · The authorised early history, written at peak optimism.
Tim Wu · 2010 · How communications industries consolidate; frames cable's regulatory position.
Paul Allen · 2011 · Insider memoir by the co-founder, including his break with Gates.
Steven Levy · 2011 · The fullest inside-access history of Google's first decade.
Jon Gertner · 2012 · Bell Labs, and what a regulated network monopoly could afford to fund.
Tyler Cowen · 2013 · Cowen on labour polarisation as machines take the middle
Susan P. Crawford · 2013 · Built around the Comcast-NBCUniversal deal and broadband monopoly.
Chris Anderson · 2013
Ernest Freeberg · 2013 · What electric light did to American life; the market Edison created.
Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford · 2013
Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg · 2014 · Insider account by the former CEO and product chief.
Walter Isaacson · 2014 · Collaboration, not lone genius, as the engine of the digital era.
Michael S. Malone · 2014 · Noyce, Moore and Grove as a single founding partnership.
Stephen Witt · 2015 · How the MP3 destroyed recorded-music revenue and set up the streaming rebuild.
Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff · 2015 · BlackBerry's rise and collapse, Canada's largest technology failure.
Nicholas Carlson · 2015 · The last turnaround attempt, with a long history of the decline.
Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey · 2015 · Wall Street Journal reporters on money, trust and the blockchain claim.
Pedro Domingos · 2015 · The five tribes of machine learning explained for non-specialists
David McCullough · 2015 · Two bicycle makers solving flight through iteration and self-funding
Jimmy Soni, Rob Goodman · 2017 · Claude Shannon and the invention of information theory
Jason Schreier · 2017 · Development economics told through ten troubled productions.
Zeynep Tufekci · 2017 · Why the platform mattered politically, and what that cost it.
Kai-Fu Lee · 2018 · The Chinese platform ecosystem Alibaba competes inside.
Yves Doz, Keeley Wilson · 2018 · Subtitled Exploring the Rise and Fall of Nokia in Mobile Phones.
Shoshana Zuboff · 2018 · Behavioural data as the raw material of the ad model.
Saifedean Ammous · 2018 · The hard-money case for bitcoin; the most cited book inside the community.
Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri · 2019 · The hidden on-demand labour that makes automated services work.
Adam Higginbotham · 2019 · The event that set the industry back a generation.
Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie · 2019 · Innovation platforms versus transaction platforms, and why most fail.
Steven Levy · 2020 · Subtitled The Inside Story; the fullest institutional history.
Liam Vaughan · 2020 · Navinder Sarao, spoofing and the 2010 crash.
Sarah Frier · 2020 · The Instagram acquisition and what Zuckerberg did to its founders.
Brian Christian · 2020 · The technical safety agenda OpenAI claims to serve.
Christian Brose · 2020 · The defence procurement failure Palantir sells against.
Nadia Eghbal · 2020 · Maintainer economics: who actually pays for open source, and how.
Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang · 2021 · Cambridge Analytica onward; the standard scandal-era account.
Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang · 2021 · Adversarial reporting on Zuckerberg and Sandberg's decisions.
Christopher Mims · 2021 · One item followed through the modern JIT supply chain end to end.
Peter Robison · 2021 · The standard account of the culture shift behind the MAX crashes.
Cade Metz · 2021 · How deep learning found the GPU, the demand Nvidia was built on.
Tim Higgins · 2021 · Model 3 production hell and the near-bankruptcy years.
Andrew Chen · 2021 · Free tiers used as the tool for reaching network critical mass.
Tripp Mickle · 2022 · Cook and Ive after Jobs; the standard modern-era Apple book.
Chris Miller · 2022 · Intel's rise and manufacturing decline inside the global chip contest.
Mustafa Suleyman, Michael Bhaskar · 2023 · DeepMind co-founder on containment; the rival lab's view.
Henry Farrell, Abraham Newman · 2023 · How trade and payment chokepoints became instruments of state coercion.
Ashlee Vance · 2023 · The small-launch competitors created in SpaceX's wake.
Anupreeta Das · 2024 · First full modern biography, covering the post-Microsoft reinvention.
Kate Conger, Ryan Mac · 2024 · Subtitled How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter; the fullest takeover account.
Kate Conger, Ryan Mac · 2024 · The Twitter takeover, reported from inside the company.
Tae Kim · 2024 · Company history and Jensen Huang's management system.
Eric Berger · 2024 · Sequel covering Falcon 9, reuse and Dragon crew flights.
Patrick McGee · 2025 · What Apple actually built by renting other people's factories for two decades.
Sarah Wynn-Williams · 2025 · Insider memoir by a former director of global public policy.
Karen Hao · 2025 · Critical history of OpenAI's mission drift and resource extraction.
Keach Hagey · 2025 · Sam Altman biography covering the November 2023 firing and return.
Michael Steinberger · 2025 · Alex Karp and Palantir's path from CIA money to the surveillance state.
Alexander C. Karp, Nicholas W. Zamiska · 2025 · Insider manifesto by Palantir's CEO on tech and national power.
Lynn White · 1962 · How the stirrup and the plough reorganised medieval society and economy
John Drury Clark · 1972 · Insider history of liquid rocket propellant development
Pamela McCorduck · 1979 · The first hype cycle recorded as it happened.
John Newhouse · 1982 · Classic on the bet-the-company economics of airliner programs.
Howard Rheingold · 1985 · Contemporary account of the personal-computing idea PARC realised.
George Gilder · 1989
David E. Nye · 1990 · How a general-purpose technology diffused through everyday commercial life.
Richard Preston · 1991 · Nucor building a mini-mill at the bottom of the steel cycle.
Daniel Crevier · 1993 · Written after the second AI winter; the corrective to every cycle of enthusiasm.
Paul Carroll · 1993 · Subtitled The Unmaking of IBM; the collapse Gerstner inherited.
Randall E. Stross · 1993 · Contemporaneous account of the NeXT failure.
Emerson W. Pugh · 1995 · Technical and organisational history through the System/360 era.
T. A. Heppenheimer · 1995 · Industry context for the deregulation opening Southwest exploited.
Robert H. Reid · 1997 · Contemporary profiles including Yahoo's founding by Yang and Filo.
James Wallace · 1997 · Sequel to Hard Drive, on the browser wars and the road to antitrust.
Charles J. Murray · 1997 · Seymour Cray and the supercomputer business he built and lost
Anthony B. Perkins, Michael C. Perkins · 1999 · Written before the crash, naming Yahoo among the overvalued.
Jeremy Rifkin · 2000 · Early and prescient case that access would displace ownership.
David Bank · 2001 · Internal strategy fights over the internet and the antitrust case.
Craig Addison · 2001 · Early statement of the argument that chip supply deters invasion.
Sam Williams · 2002 · Stallman, the GPL, and the licence that shapes commercial open source.
Peter Drahos, John Braithwaite · 2002 · How TRIPS globalised the IP rent model.
Martti Häikiö · 2002 · Company-sanctioned history with access to the boardroom record.
Adam Cohen · 2002 · eBay: the cleanest early case of a pure marketplace take rate.
Om Malik · 2003 · The telecom capex bubble, with Ebbers and WorldCom at its centre.
Kara Swisher · 2003 · The AOL side of the merger, reported as it collapsed.
David Owen · 2004 · Chester Carlson and xerography, the invention that funded PARC.
Paul Graham · 2004 · Subtitled 'Big Ideas from the Computer Age'; collects early essays
Lisa Endlich · 2004 · Lucent and the collapse of the equipment vendors.
David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee · 2005 · Payments economics: interchange, closed loops and why Amex's model differs.
Karl Fogel · 2005 · The operational manual for running a project and its sponsors.
Joel N. Shurkin · 2006 · Shockley and the accidental seeding of Silicon Valley.
Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams · 2006
John Newhouse · 2007 · The duopoly rivalry and the 787 and A380 bets.
James Bessen, Michael J. Meurer · 2008 · Evidence that patents work poorly as property; the IP-as-asset skeptic case.
Sea-Jin Chang · 2008 · Strategy comparison explaining how Samsung overtook Sony.
Marshall Phelps, David Kline · 2009 · Microsoft's IP chief on rebuilding a licensing business from litigation.
Clair Brown, Greg Linden · 2009 · Academic account of the industry's shift to contract manufacturing.
Ben Mezrich · 2009 · Dramatised founding story; source for The Social Network.
Stewart Brand · 2009 · Environmentalist case for nuclear power, dense cities and genetic engineering
Barry Johnson · 2010 · Execution algorithms and direct market access, from the desk.
Peter Fox-Penner · 2010 · Utility business models after the regulated-growth era.
Joe Weinman · 2012 · The maths of pay-per-use versus owned capacity.
Scott Patterson · 2012 · How electronic trading and off-exchange venues took over.
Randall E. Stross · 2012 · Inside Y Combinator in the years before Altman ran it.
Eric Benjamin Seufert · 2013 · The arithmetic of conversion rates, whales and lifetime value.
Neil Chenoweth · 2013 · The pay-TV smartcard hacking operation; the strangest corner of the empire.
Robert E. Gallamore, John R. Meyer · 2014 · The economics of Staggers Act deregulation.
David L. Sedlak · 2014 · The engineering and capital replacement cycle of urban water systems.
Seth M. Siegel · 2015 · Water technology as an export industry built from a domestic constraint.
Arnold Thackray, David C. Brock, Rachel Jones · 2015 · Authorised biography of Gordon Moore and his forecast.
Sangeet Paul Choudary · 2015 · Designing the interaction that a platform is actually built around.
David S. Abraham · 2015 · How minor metals are mined, traded and hoarded.
Steve LeVine · 2015 · The battery-technology race that decides Tesla's cost curve.
Tom Slee · 2015 · The critical case: platform power, housing supply and regulatory arbitrage.
Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott · 2016 · The high-water mark of enterprise blockchain enthusiasm.
Antonio Garcia Martinez · 2016 · Insider account of Facebook's ads business by a product manager.
Bitange Ndemo, Tim Weiss · 2016 · Edited by the regulator who enabled M-Pesa; founder interviews throughout.
Julian Guthrie · 2016 · The Ansari X Prize and the origin of commercial human spaceflight.
Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson · 2016 · Practitioner account of how platform businesses capture a transaction.
Michael D. Smith, Rahul Telang · 2016 · Data economics of the shift from studios to streamers.
Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz · 2016 · What licensing instead of selling does to the buyer.
Gretchen Bakke · 2016 · Why the regulated grid's economics are breaking.
Joshua Cooper Ramo · 2016 · Power in a networked age; connection as the source of advantage
Arun Sundararajan · 2016 · Economics of trust and matching that make marketplaces like Airbnb work.
Yaakov Katz, Amir Bohbot · 2017 · How military procurement feeds the commercial technology pipeline.
Lawrence D. Burns, Christopher Shulgan · 2018 · Autonomy from the incumbent and Waymo side.
Emily Chang · 2018 · Reporting on the culture that produced Uber's 2017 crisis.
Ken Kocienda · 2018 · Insider account by the engineer who built the iPhone keyboard.
Nathan Schneider · 2018 · Platform co-operativism and the revival of member ownership.
Susan P. Crawford · 2018 · The broadband infrastructure argument against incumbent cable operators.
Sarah Kessler · 2018 · The gig-work model Uber's unit economics depend on.
Jeremias Prassl · 2018 · Legal analysis of classification, the model's load-bearing assumption.
Hamish McKenzie · 2018 · Tesla within the global shift away from the combustion engine.
David Rosenberg · 2018 · The sceptical case: the tech sector is an enclave, not an economy.
George Gilder · 2018 · The case that blockchain architectures displace the centralised web
Tim Fernholz · 2018 · The commercial-space policy fight that let SpaceX in.
Christian Davenport · 2018 · SpaceX against Blue Origin and the legacy contractors.
Alex Rosenblat · 2018 · Field research on algorithmic management of drivers.
Adam Fisher · 2018 · Oral history; Thiel and the PayPal cohort speak in their own words.
Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne · 2019 · Insider account by Microsoft's president on tech policy and regulation.
Roger McNamee · 2019 · By an early mentor and investor who turned against the company.
Tim Hwang · 2020 · The case that programmatic advertising is a mispriced market.
Camila Russo · 2020 · Narrative history of Ethereum and smart contracts.
Susan Fowler · 2020 · Insider memoir by the engineer whose blog post triggered the reckoning.
Alex Davies · 2021 · The self-driving contest Tesla bet its valuation on.
Saul Griffith · 2021 · The demand side: what full electrification of homes and vehicles requires.
Jason Schreier · 2021 · Studio closures and the industry's labour instability.
Ben Mezrich · 2021 · GameStop and Citadel Securities' order flow; dramatised.
Max Chafkin · 2021 · Peter Thiel biography with substantial Palantir founding material.
Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski · 2022 · The streaming wars Netflix started, from the studios' side.
Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow · 2022 · How intermediaries capture creative-work rents; the bear case for creators.
Lori Garver · 2022 · NASA insider on the policy fight that funded commercial crew.
Lulu Yilun Chen · 2022 · Alibaba's principal rival; the two firms are best read together.
Laura Shin · 2022 · The Ethereum world and token economics FTX was built to trade.
Balaji Srinivasan · 2022 · Argument that online communities can become sovereign; crypto-native politics
Rob Walling, Jason Cohen · 2022 · Bootstrapped SaaS economics: pricing, churn, plateau.
Ben Mezrich · 2023 · Fast narrative of the takeover and the layoffs.
Jeff Horwitz · 2023 · Built on the Facebook Files documents leaked by Frances Haugen.
Ben McKenzie, Jacob Silverman · 2023 · Includes the authors' own interview with Bankman-Fried.
Kurt Wagner · 2024 · Jack Dorsey's second tenure through the sale to Musk.
Kara Swisher · 2024 · Memoir by the reporter closest to Altman through the board crisis.
Zoë Schiffer · 2024 · The takeover told through the employees who lived through it.
Parmy Olson · 2024 · The OpenAI-DeepMind race that set the shape of Nvidia's customer base.
Raj M. Shah, Christopher Kirchhoff · 2024 · Insiders on Pentagon-Valley contracting where Palantir won; Open Library unreachable.
Gary Rivlin · 2025 · The founder scene around OpenAI, reported from inside the funding rounds.
John Ousterhout · Ousterhout's core argument — that the enemy of good software is complexity, and that complexity accumulates through shallow abstractions and tactical shortcuts — maps directly onto the failure mode of AI-assisted development. Models are natural tactical coders. This book argues for the strategic counterweight.
Robert C. Martin · Controversial in its prescriptiveness, but useful precisely because AI-generated code routinely violates every heuristic in it: long functions, unclear names, mixed levels of abstraction. Reading Martin sharpens the vocabulary for what to fix in a model's output, even if the rules are applied with judgment rather than dogma.
Ethan Mollick · Mollick is a Wharton professor who studies AI adoption and writes with unusual clarity about working alongside LLMs across knowledge domains. The framing — that effective AI collaboration requires treating the model as a co-worker with specific strengths and specific blind spots — is the most practically useful frame available for day-to-day coding with AI.
Martin Fowler · Fowler catalogued the moves that make existing code better without changing its behavior. In an era where AI generates working-but-messy first drafts, refactoring is the core skill: not writing code from scratch, but reshaping what you have. The catalog of smells is a better prompt-debugging tool than most people realize.
David Thomas, Andrew Hunt · The craft baseline. Hunt and Thomas articulate the discipline that AI code generation does not replace: knowing when code is good enough, how to automate the right things, and what a working developer owes to the person reading the code next. The 20th-anniversary edition updated the examples but the reasoning has not aged.
Frederick P. Brooks · 1974 · Why adding people to a late software project makes it later.
Timothy Lister, Tom DeMarco · 1987
James Chposky, Ted Leonsis · 1988 · How the IBM PC was built outside the normal organisation.
Stan Davis, Bill Davidson · 1991
Helmut Kopka, Patrick W. Daly · 1993
Paul Graham · 1993 · Out of print; Graham distributes it free as a PDF
Paul Graham · 1995 · Open Library records first_publish_year as 1996
John Hagel III, Arthur G. Armstrong · 1997
Jennifer Edstrom, Marlin Eller · 1998 · Insider account by a former Windows developer; hostile in tone.
John Hagel III, Marc Singer · 1999
George Gilder · 2000 · Bandwidth-abundance thesis; useful as a period document of the bubble.
Alan Macfarlane · 2002
Phillip F. Schewe · 2007
Anthony Michell · 2010 · Business-school style account of the memory and display strategy.
Lars Tvede · 2010 · Long-horizon view of the trends reshaping economies and markets.
Christopher Steiner · 2012 · Popular account of algorithms taking over trading and other trades.
Kevin Werbach, Dan Hunter · 2012
Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden · 2012
Nathan Shedroff, Christopher Noessel · 2012
Tonny K. Omwansa, Nicholas P. Sullivan · 2012 · How Safaricom built the world's reference mobile-money business.
Erik Seedhouse · 2013 · Technical survey of the early vehicles and contracts.
Michael Lewis · 2014 · The IEX story and the public argument about latency arbitrage.
Yukari Iwatani Kane · 2014 · Early and much-disputed argument that Apple declined after Jobs.
Winston Ma · 2016 · Payments and mobile commerce structure behind Alipay and Taobao.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Eric Meyer · 2016
David Gerard · 2017 · The sceptic's brief against crypto claims.
Julie A. Cohn · 2017 · Institutional history of interconnection and who controls it.
Avi Jorisch · 2018 · Case studies of Israeli technologies and how they were commercialised.
Randall Munroe · 2019
Ramon Lobato · 2019 · The geography and licensing constraints of global streaming.
Tom Chivers · 2019 · The rationalist milieu behind OpenAI's founders and its board fight.
Robert C. Jacobson · 2020 · One of the few attempts at a survey of the commercial sector.
Jean Burgess, Nancy K. Baym · 2020 · Scholarly account of the product and its user culture.
Campbell R. Harvey, Ashwin Ramachandran, Joey Santoro · with Ashwin Ramachandran, Joey Santoro · 2021 · Wiley. Open Library API unreachable this pass.
Reid Hoffman · 2023 · Subtitled 'Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI'; co-written with GPT-4
Yuval Noah Harari · 2024
Reid Hoffman, Greg Beato · with Greg Beato · 2025
Marc Andreessen · 2025 · Standalone edition of the 2023 a16z essay; Andreessen has written no conventional book
Geoffrey Knight
Matthias Schrader, Volker Martens
David Gelernter
T4 FIRE
Dan Ward
Clarence L. Johnson
Jason Bade, Scott Bade Steve Hilton
Kai Brach
Humphrey Jennings
Tom Christiansen et al.
Chris Dixon
Mohan Sawhney
Eric Enge et al.
Nicholas Lovell
Daniel P. Friedman, Matthias Felleisen
Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey
Gabriel Kirmaier
Gary Wolf