Best Computer & Technology Biographies Books
Who doesn’t enjoy listening to a good story. Personally I love reading about the people who inspire me and what it took for them to achieve their success.
1. Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography
Author: by Walter Isaacson
Simon & Schuster
English
656 pages
Walter Isaacson’s enthralling (The New Yorker) worldwide bestselling biography of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two yearsas well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleaguesWalter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.
Isaacson’s portrait touched millions of readers. At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology.
He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. Although Jobs cooperated with the author, he asked for no control over what was written. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly.
2. Once Upon A Time In Carrotland: My YouTube Autobiography Which I Definitely Wrote All Of
Author: by Josh Carrott
English
112 pages
191371358X
BUY THIS BOOK TO HELP US GIVE CARROTLAND IN NEW ZEALAND A NEW STATUE! Is he a man or is he a carrot? In this groundbreaking autobiography of a YouTube icon, we get to the root of it. In this breathtaking debut, Josh Carrott peels back the curtain to reveal an epic saga of friendship, true love, and a prophecy that will change his life forever.
Gird your loins and hold on tight for the unfiltered story of his fascinating and vitamin-A-infused life. Frequently Asked QuestionsIs this book real?Yes, it’s real. Hopefully it’ll make for an entertaining read. There are dozens of previously undisclosed stories from Josh’s life and our YouTube journey.
There are also an abundance of Easter eggs and behind the scenes photos for your viewing pleasure. Are you actually going to get a statue in Carrotland (Ohakune Carrot Adventure Park), New Zealand?Yes! If we raise enough money we will.
The design is TBC, but Jollybeans will be updated on our progress as it happens. Was the book really written before the episode aired on JOLLY?Yes. This this exact book Josh read from in the episode. His was a prepublication copy, hence the grey Not For Resale watermark on the front cover.
3
What Would You Do If You Weren't Afraid?: Discover a Life Filled with Purpose and Joy Through the Secrets of Jewish Wisdom
Author: by Michal Oshman
DK (May 4, 2021)
English
256 pages
Let Michal Oshman take you on a journey of self discovery to identify what makes you you, what you were born to do and how to do it. As a mentor for leaders in top global companies, Michal created a unique personal growth methodology based on the life-changing principles of Jewish wisdom.
It is easy to think that the daily challenges we experience in the 21st century are new and unlike any that people faced in the past. Michal draws on her own heritage and a wide range of Chassidut (Jewish teachings) to offer practical advice for common concerns, such as a broken heart, parenting, overcoming setbacks, and getting the most out of your career.
By challenging you to explore what matters, Michal offers solutions to your everyday struggles. She will empower you as well as teach you how to adopt her self-development tools to discover who you really are and what you were born to do with your life.
With its uplifting belief that you already have all the ingredients within you to lead a joyous life, Michal’s unique mix of corporate culture experience and Jewish wisdom will help you reconnect with yourself. This unique book will help you to find your courage, and move forward freely, with no fear at all!
4. The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage
Author: by Cliff Stoll
English
399 pages
1416507787
Before the Internet became widely known as a global tool for terrorists, one perceptive U.S. Citizen recognized its ominous potential. Armed with clear evidence of computer espionage, he began a highly personal quest to expose a hidden network of spies that threatened national security.
But would the authorities back him up? Cliff Stoll’s dramatic firsthand account is “a computer-age detective story, instantly fascinating [and] astonishingly gripping” (Smithsonian). Cliff Stoll was an astronomer turned systems manager at Lawrence Berkeley Lab when a 75-cent accounting error alerted him to the presence of an unauthorized user on his system.
The hacker’s code name was “Hunter” – a mysterious invader who managed to break into U.S. Computer systems and steal sensitive military and security information. Stoll began a one-man hunt of his own: spying on the spy. It was a dangerous game of deception, broken codes, satellites, and missile bases – a one-man sting operation that finally gained the attention of the CIA…
5. Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
Author: by Antonio Garcia Martinez
B07C7DM72N
Harper Paperbacks
July 24, 2018
The instant New York Times bestseller, now available in paperback and featuring a new afterword from the authorthe insider’s guide to the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, the inner workings of the tech world, and who really runs Silicon Valley Incisive….
The most fun business book I have read this year…. Clearly there will be people who hate this book which is probably one of the things that makes it such a great read. Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York TimesImagine a chimpanzee rampaging through a datacenter powering everything from Google to Facebook.
Infrastructure engineers use a software version of this chaos monkey to test online services’ robustnesstheir ability to survive random failure and correct mistakes before they actually occur. Tech entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys. One of Silicon Valley’s most audacious chaos monkeys is Antonio Garca Martnez.
After stints on Wall Street and as CEO of his own startup, Garca Martnez joined Facebook’s nascent advertising team. Forced out in the wake of an internal product war over the future of the company’s monetization strategy, Garca Martnez eventually landed at rival Twitter.
6. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
Author: by Walter Isaacson
Simon & Schuster
English
560 pages
Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed The Innovators is a riveting, propulsive, and at times deeply moving (The Atlantic) story of the people who created the computer and the internet.
What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail? The Innovators is a masterly saga of collaborative genius destined to be the standard history of the digital revolutionand an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens.
Isaacson begins the adventure with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s. He explores the fascinating personalities that created our current digital revolution, such as Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R.
Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Larry Page. This is the story of how their minds worked and what made them so inventive. It’s also a narrative of how their ability to collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more creative.
7. Uncanny Valley: A Memoir
Author: by Anna Wiener
B07QYHLP97
MCD (January 14, 2020)
January 14, 2020
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2020. Named one of the Best Books of 2020 by The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, ELLE, Esquire, Parade, Teen Vogue, The Boston Globe, Forbes, The Times (UK), Fortune, Chicago Tribune, Glamour, The A.V.
Club, Vox, Jezebel, Town & Country, OneZero, Apartment Therapy, Good Housekeeping, PopMatters, Electric Literature, Self, The Week (UK) and BookPage. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a January 2020 IndieNext Pick.”A definitive document of a world in transition: I won’t be alone in returning to it for clarity and consolation for many years to come.” -Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-DelusionThe prescient, page-turning account of a journey in Silicon Valley: a defining memoir of our digital ageIn her mid-twenties, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wienerstuck, broke, and looking for meaning in her work, like any good millennial-left a job in book publishing for the promise of the new digital economy.
8. Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker
Author: by Kevin Mitnick
Back Bay Books
English
448 pages
In this “intriguing, insightful and extremely educational” novel, the world’s most famous hacker teaches you easy cloaking and counter-measures for citizens and consumers in the age of Big Brother and Big Data (Frank W.Abagnale). Kevin Mitnick was the most elusive computer break-in artist in history.
He accessed computers and networks at the world’s biggest companies – and no matter how fast the authorities were, Mitnick was faster, sprinting through phone switches, computer systems, and cellular networks. As the FBI’s net finally began to tighten, Mitnick went on the run, engaging in an increasingly sophisticated game of hide-and-seek that escalated through false identities, a host of cities, and plenty of close shaves, to an ultimate showdown with the Feds, who would stop at nothing to bring him down.
Ghost in the Wires is a thrilling true story of intrigue, suspense, and unbelievable escapes – and a portrait of a visionary who forced the authorities to rethink the way they pursued him, and forced companies to rethink the way they protect their most sensitive information.
9. Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers
Author: by Andy Greenberg
B07GD4MFW2
English
5861 KB
The true story of the most devastating cyberattack in history and the desperate hunt to identify and track the elite Russian agents behind it, from Wired senior writer Andy Greenberg. Lays out in chilling detail how future wars will be waged in cyberspace and makes the case that we have done little, as of yet, to prevent it.
Washington PostIn 2014, the world witnessed the start of a mysterious series of cyberattacks. Targeting American utility companies, NATO, and electric grids in Eastern Europe, the strikes grew ever more brazen. They culminated in the summer of 2017, when the malware known as NotPetya was unleashed, penetrating, disrupting, and paralyzing some of the world’s largest businessesfrom drug manufacturers to software developers to shipping companies.
At the attack’s epicenter in Ukraine, ATMs froze. The railway and postal systems shut down. Hospitals went dark. NotPetya spread around the world, inflicting an unprecedented ten billion dollars in damagethe largest, most destructive cyberattack the world had ever seen.
10. Bitcoin Billionaires
Author: by Ben Mezrich
Flatiron Books
English
288 pages
From Ben Mezrich, the New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House, comes Bitcoin Billionaires-the fascinating story of brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss’s big bet on crypto-currency and its dazzling pay-off. Ben Mezrich’s 2009 bestseller The Accidental Billionaires is the definitive account of Facebook’s founding and the basis for the Academy Awardwinning film The Social Network.
Two of the story’s iconic characters are Harvard students Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss: identical twins, Olympic rowers, and foils to Mark Zuckerberg. Bitcoin Billionaires is the story of the brothers’ redemption and revenge in the wake of their epic legal battle with Facebook.
Planning to start careers as venture capitalists, the brothers quickly discover that no one will take their money after their fight with Zuckerberg. While nursing their wounds in Ibiza, they accidentally run into an eccentric character who tells them about a brand-new idea: cryptocurrency.
11. The Dream Machine
Author: by M. Mitchell Waldrop
Stripe Press
English
528 pages
Behind every great revolution is a vision and behind perhaps the greatest revolution of our time, personal computing, is the vision of J.C.R.Licklider. He did not design the first personal computers or write the software that ran on them, nor was he involved in the legendary early companies that brought them to the forefront of our everyday experience.
He was instead a relentless visionary that saw the potential of the way individuals could interact with computers and software. At a time when computers were a short step removed from mechanical data processors, Licklider was writing treatises on “human-computer symbiosis”, “computers as communication devices”, and a now not-so-unfamiliar “Intergalactic Network.” His ideas became so influential, his passion so contagious, that Waldrop called him “computing’s Johnny Appleseed.
In a simultaneously compelling personal narrative and comprehensive historical exposition, Waldrop tells the story of the man who not only instigated the work that led to the internet, but also shifted our understanding of what computers were and could be.
12. The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993–Illustrated Edition
Author: by Jordan Mechner
Stripe Press
English
336 pages
A deep dive into the origins of the epic, best-selling video game, featuring previously unreleased content, in the game creator’s own words “Mechner’s journey is a universal one for anyone creating something brand new… I’m excited to revisit these journals in newly illustrated form.”- Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram The creator of one of the most innovative and best-selling video games of all time gives an unvarnished look into the process in this one-of-a-kind compilation.
Before Prince of Persia was a best-selling video game franchise and a Disney movie, it was an Apple II computer game created and programmed by one person, Jordan Mechner. Mechner’s candid and revealing journals from the time capture the journey from his parents’ basement to the forefront of the fast-growing 1980s video game industry…
And the creative, technical, and personal struggles that brought the prince into being and ultimately into the homes of millions of people worldwide. Now, on the 30th anniversary of Prince of Persia’s release, Mechner looks back at the journals he kept from 1985 to 1993, offering new insights into the game that established him as a pioneer of cinematic storytelling in the industry.
13. Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance
Author: by Matthew Brennan
B08L3NW6VM
English
304 pages
An essential read TechCrunchIn 2012, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance was just a handful of geeks working out of a scrappy four-bedroom apartment in Beijing. Today, it is the world’s fastest-growing tech behemoth worth in excess of $100 billion, unrecognizable from its humble beginnings.
Thousands of articles have been written about TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance, but no one has told the complete story.Until now. Brennan’s book documents for the first time the ascendancy and missteps of a company that has forever changed the way we think about China and Chinese technology.
A creative blend of storytelling and analysis, interwoven with captivating anecdotes of TikTok, rare photos of ByteDance’s original team, incisive analysis and telling infographics, Attention Factory is an essential read for those looking to understand how ideas in the American and Chinese internet worlds collided, coincided and converged throughout the past decade.
Why was ByteDance, a Chinese company, the one to build TikTok? Exactly who is Zhang Yiming, the company’s mysterious founder? Which little known growth hacks did ByteDance use in their rise to the top? Does TikTok herald a new era of Chinese companies challenging Silicon Valley?
14. Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built
Author: by Duncan Clark
Ecco
English
304 pages
In just a decade and half Jack Ma, a man who rose from humble beginnings and started his career as an English teacher, founded and built Alibaba into the second largest Internet company in the world. The company’s $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the world’s largest, valuing the company more than Facebook or Coca Cola.
Alibaba today runs the e-commerce services that hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers depend on every day, providing employment and income for tens of millions more. A Rockefeller of his age, Jack has become an icon for the country’s booming private sector, and as the face of the new, consumerist China is courted by heads of state and CEOs from around the world.
Granted unprecedented access to a wealth of new material including exclusive interviews, Clark draws on his own first-hand experience of key figures integral to Alibaba’s rise to create an authoritative, compelling narrative account of how Alibaba and its charismatic creator have transformed the way that Chinese exercise their new found economic freedom, inspiring entrepreneurs around the world and infuriating others, turning the tables on the Silicon Valley giants who have tried to stand in his way.
15. The Soul of A New Machine
Author: by Tracy Kidder
English
320 pages
0316491977
Tracy Kidder’s “riveting” (Washington Post) story of one company’s efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and has become essential reading for understanding the history of the American tech industry.
Computers have changed since 1981, when The Soul of a New Machine first examined the culture of the computer revolution. What has not changed is the feverish pace of the high-tech industry, the go-for-broke approach to business that has caused so many computer companies to win big (or go belly up), and the cult of pursuing mind-bending technological innovations.
The Soul of a New Machine is an essential chapter in the history of the machine that revolutionized the world in the twentieth century.”Fascinating… A surprisingly gripping account of people at work.” -Wall Street Journal
