HN Books @HNBooksMonth

I'm going to say Soul of a New Machine made me cry and, especially if you do low level stuff or hardware, is one of the best books which shows overwhelming passion for the art.

https://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/0316...

⬐ ggm

100% agree.

Neither of these is exactly what you asked for, but both are awesome in their own way, and both are (narrow and somewhat dated) histories:

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy.

The Pulitzer Prize Winning) The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder. The second one literally changed my life in leading me to computers.

Links: https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution-An...

https://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/0316...

⬐ cellularmitosis

Brian Cantrill also enthusiastically recommended Soul of a New Machine.

⬐ jambulance

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy absolutely changed my life when I found it as a young boy in the local library. Possibly the most read book on my bookshelf!

Ugh.

If you want to do something like this right, the way to do it is the way Data General wanted to do it when IBM, then the 800-pound gorilla of the computer world, entered into DG's minicomputer market. (Which is described in Tracy Kidder's classic book The Soul of a New Machine (https://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/0316...)

The ad they proposed was much simpler -- a full page that said only the following:

They say IBM's entry into minicomputers will legitimize the market.

The bastards say, welcome.

If anyone new to the industry (software or hardware) hasn't read this yet -- you really really should. We had an MV-8000 at college and it performed quite well, considering the loads we threw at it (I recall it running ADA, COBOL, and Pascal compilers all at the same time)

http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/03164...

Some that I liked:

- Hackers : http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Anniversar...

- The Soul of a New Machine: http://www.amazon.com/The-Soul-A-New-Machine/dp/0316491977

- Show Stopper! : http://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Micr...

- Dealers of Lightning: http://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer/...

- Where Wizards Stay Up Late: http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/06848326...

⬐ LarryMade2

I'd add in that list the New Hacker's Dictionary edited by Eric S Raymond http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Hackers-Dictionary-Edition/dp/... - (aka the Jargon File http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/ ) It includes many computing terms invented over the years with their meanings and origins. You can learn a a bit about computer history by readin it.

⬐ ctrijueque

'Hackers' is avalaible as a free ebook too:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/729

⬐ grkvlt

"The Soul of a New Machine" is an excellent book. It is about the creation of the first 32 bit minicomputer hardware, complete with descriptions of ADVENTURE (aka Colossal Cave) and the "Maze of twisty passages all alike" and memorable lines such as "I am going to a commune in Vermont, and will deal with no time period shorter than a season" said after much work on gate delays and intstruction timing iassues...

⬐ cschmidt

I thought Hackers and Soul of a New Machine were both fantastic.

⬐ 0xdeadbeefbabe

Dealers of Lightning because you might learn some new words, and did you know they had to fight to get the laser printer to the world?

⬐ deutronium

I'll second Hackers Heroes of the Computer Revolution, I found that a really fascinating book.

⬐ veddox

Absolutely. It does a great job of showing the spirit of the early hackers at MIT, even though it's not really a technical book.

⬐ None

None

⬐ ritchiea

Hackers was a fun read but I don't think it's really an answer to the original question asking about computing history and expressing a concern that our field has a short memory. The OP's complaint was that most history stops at Turing and everything in Hackers is about MIT post-Turing.

⬐ duaneb

> The OP's complaint was that most history stops at Turing and everything in Hackers is about MIT post-Turing.

Before Turing, it was a handful of people obsessed with computing things efficiently. That history is difficult to extract from the hardware pre-Turing.

I hate to sound hyperbolic, but I can't overstate how impressive this work is. For me, it evokes nothing so much as Tracy Kidder's The Soul of A New Machine [0] for opening up an obscure world (the one many HN posters live in, but obscure to most people). I am amazed both by the technical fidelity and by the quality of the story telling.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/03164...

⬐ mangeletti

I agree. This is the best piece of writing I think I've ever read on the web. This touches on everything, and so accurately, and so concisely... this article is giving me a stroke I think.

⬐ cfeduke

Same, one of the best things I've read. It may rank above Programming Sucks[1] which is my go to reference for friends when they ask me to explain to them what it is I do.

1. http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

⬐ mangeletti

The big red semicolon picture near the bottom had me cracking up so hard. I will need to re-read this article every week for the rest of my life, in order to fully enjoy it.

⬐ meowface

I've never seen anything like this on a website before. The writing, the formatting, the structure, the animations; it's near perfect.

⬐ jheriko

are we reading the same article??!?!

the content is quite good but the layout, colour, animations etc. are a mess.

⬐ mangeletti

Look

⬐ meowface

There is a fine line between mess and art. :)

⬐ mteruel

And this article just crossed :D

It doesn't take place in Silicon Valley but I thought "Soul of a New Machine" [1] was a great read!

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Soul-A-New-Machine/dp/0316491977

⬐ leoc

Further afield again, We Were Burning http://www.worldcat.org/title/we-were-burning-japanese-entre... is a cracking history of the consumer electronics industry (largely distinct from the MITI-favoured computer firms) in Japan, and sometimes elsewhere.

⬐ vram22

Yes, I read that book some years ago and thought it was a great read too - in the sense of entertaining, like a novel, even though it is mainly about the computer industry and the race to create that computer, a next generation Data General minicomputer. It's also to a good extent about skunkworks style product development. I love that quote about pinball in the book; won't spoil it for readers by saying what it is, but it is likely to appeal to many people on HN.

⬐ vram22

Just saw this, from the Wikipedia article about the book, and thought it worth posting:

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/8.12/soul.html

It's a short article in Wired about Tom West, the leader of the team that built the machine, many years later, when he was retired in a coastal town.

⬐ jacquesm

That's one of the best computing related books I've ever read. I keep giving it to younger programmers. Great read.

⬐ ghaff

Probably the best book about the development of a tech project ever written. (Disclaimer: I worked at DG for a long time, albeit starting a bit after the events of the book, and knew many of the folks depicted.) Showstopper, about Windows NT, is another good read in this vein.

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, the classic book following the development of a new minicomputer in the late 70s.

http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/03164...

Stealing The Network: How to Own the Box. This is a collection of fictional accounts of "hacking" written by hackers. Real world techniques are described though its in lightweight detail, the aim of the book is more to give an insight into how an attacker thinks. It's quite an enjoyable read too.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stealing-Network-How-Own-Cyber-Ficti...

Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground by Kevin Poulsen. This one's a true story.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kingpin-Hacker-Billion-Dollar-Cyberc...

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software By Charles Petzold. I still have to read this one, but I expect it would fit in with what you're after quite well.

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...

> We're all programmers, but we're not all the same

Which is a rebuttal to something I didn't actually say, but OK.

Look, obviously there are all different kinds of programmers. Millions and millions of people program computers today, so there's no end to the ways you can slice them apart. There are kernel programmers and GUI programmers, mainframe programmers and mobile programmers, Lisp programmers and BASIC programmers, elite programmers and n00b programmers.

But they are all programmers, was my point. They all do the work of wrestling with, as one of the people in Tracy Kidder's classic The Soul of a New Machine (http://www.amazon.com/The-Soul-A-New-Machine/dp/0316491977) called it, "La Machine."

In this respect, being a programmer is a lot like being a coal miner: you become one by doing the work. Sure, some miners are handier with a pickaxe than others, and some can stand being down in a dark hole for longer. But regardless of that, everyone who puts on a hard hat with a lamp on it and goes into the mountain is a coal miner. The only thing you have to do to earn the designation is show up and do the work.

Now for the part of my comment where I (respectfully) challenge your conclusions.

You want to divide "programmers" further, into (essentially) "programmers," who are lazy 9-to-5 stumblebums, and "REAL programmers," who code with burning fury 23.5 hours a day (the other .5 hours they spend on HN). And then tell the people outside the "REAL programmers" category that, sure, they're "programmers," but they're not programmer programmers.

But that has a value judgment embedded in it, namely that 23.5-hour-a-day Burning Fury programming is Good Programming, and 9-to-5 programming is Bad Programming. But those positions aren't good or bad, they're just embraces of different sets of tradeoffs. You note yourself that the Burning Fury programmer sacrifices her health and relationships to get to that level. The 9-to-5 person is just someone who has decided against making that sacrifice. Maybe that limits their career growth, but it lets them hold on to those things. Maybe you've decided to let those things go in order to accomplish more in your work.

And both those decisions are fine! I'm not here to tell you how to live your life. I'm just saying that your way of being a programmer is not the only way of being a programmer. There are lots of ways to be a programmer. The only thing they all require is that you do the work.

⬐ lomnakkus

Hopefully I'm not contributing to the "schism" here, but:

I tend to divide programmers into "drones" and "meta-drones" (for want of better words).

First, "meta-drones" consider the "meta" level of programming, i.e. "could I program more reliably if I were using a different language?" or "how can I prevent myself from making similar mistakes in the future". Surprisingly few programmers actually fall into this category. This is obviously IME, so the usual observer/survivor biases may apply.

In contrast, a "drone" will just "get the job done" without any further thought.

As far as I've been able to ascertain, code maintainability/quality is entirely orthogonal to the "archetype", but there's a clear tendency that the "meta-drone" tends to improve by orders of magnitude over time.

The number of hours of work put in has no significant effect when you account for those orders of magnitude.

⬐ SomeCallMeTim

Without calling one group "REAL", it would be nice to have different words for different tiers of programmers.

And I can't comment on the poster above, but when I do think of programming skill tiers, it's not at all about number of hours put in.

Yes, if you're passionate about a problem it can mean you end up putting in extra time to solve it. But it's not about the time. It's about the passion.

Similarly, it's not calling the leave-at-5pm programmers lazy. To them it's a job, and maybe even a job they're good at. I spend a lot of time living life outside of work, and I (usually) end up quitting after only about a normal day's work.

But I also get more done in my work day than 98% of "programmers". And the reason is that I've had a consuming passion to learn about programming techniques, tools, algorithms, and even logic puzzles, ever since I can remember. So some of that free time involves reading about programming; if I enjoy it, then it certainly counts as living my life. When I don't feel like learning something about coding, I do something else in my varied set of hobbies and interests.

The reason it would be nice to have different words for different tiers of programmers is that what I do is qualitatively different than what the copy-and-paste JavaScript writer is doing. I can certainly call myself a software engineer, or a game developer, or a graphics engineer, or a low-level programmer, but none of those really encapsulate it all; I also hit high performance server development, database optimization, networking, encryption/security, video streaming, and petal-to-the-metal assembly language optimization when necessary (though that's a skill that's less and less useful these days). And on top of that I write tools that help optimize the software development process for myself and my team.

When I look at what I do vs. what a junior front-end web developer does, calling what I do the "same" as what the junior developer does is somewhat akin to calling an assistant handyman and an engineer who designs skyscrapers or rockets or nuclear reactors "both engineers, because they both help build things!". All that extra work the engineer puts in to learn and hone his trade should be worth something, and having a title for it does help.

Something that bothers me about your coal miner analogy: The best possible coal miner is likely not more than 2x-3x better than the worst. Brooks' famous 10x performance difference only captures a small part of the real difference: There are things that I can do that a JavaScript developer simply can't do, no matter how much time they put in. Brooks was only measuring people trying to accomplish similar tasks, after all. And I'm not talking about domain expertise; I also follow and keep up with JavaScript and front-end development, and it's just orders-of-magnitude simpler than what I code on a weekly basis.

And I do find that puzzle solving (though not the physical kind) does correlate pretty well with the ability to do the high-end, hard-core programming that I do. I certainly am good at both, and it would be hard to imagine how I could solve the complex algorithmic issues that I solve on a daily basis if I couldn't think clearly about logic puzzles.

⬐ reverius42

I take offense at your gross misconceptions. JavaScript is by no means an "easy" language, certainly not orders of magnitude easier than whatever it is you do. The skills of a "JavaScript developer" include combining object-oriented and functional design patterns to organize a codebase, efficiently managing asynchronous communication and state, profiling and optimizing rendering and execution performance across the CPU and graphics card, designing and implementing for network security (including testing for HTTP headers, XSS, CSRF, etc.). What is it you do again?

⬐ SomeCallMeTim

JavaScript can be used to do complex things.

A "copy-and-paste JavaScript" developer, as I referenced above, is someone who can create web pages that have simple actions, but who doesn't do much original development.

The language certainly doesn't define the programmer. I also use JavaScript on occasion; I wasn't trying to paint all JavaScript developers with the same brush.

It sounds like what you do is NOT what I'm talking about, so please don't take offense.

I write games, and tools to make games, and tools to stream interactive applications over the Internet. And apps. And the occasional web site.

⬐ reverius42

Fair enough. I think what we do is probably pretty similar, the difference being that I do it mostly in JavaScript.

Perhaps there is something to your point -- I doubt there are nearly as many successful "copy and paste C++ developers" (although I have met at least one). It might be harder to cobble together even a barely-working piece of software from StackOverflow C++ posts.

⬐ SomeCallMeTim

I've met a copy-and-paste C++ developer myself, though he ended up losing the job eventually.

Blew me away to discover this when I sat down to help him debug an algorithm that he had, in fact (correctly) copied from somewhere else, but then he'd slaughtered it trying to "make it work." Most of the fixes involved reverting his changes, and then making a couple minor modifications that WERE actually necessary.

He'd been fighting with it for a couple days. I had it streaming sound in about 15 minutes. Based on his words to me after the fact, he was really just not understanding what the code was doing. Pretty much at all.

That said, he did have some good insight into user interface design. I could see that he did have some important skill sets, but understanding how to manipulate memory in C was not one of them. Whether he was a "successful" developer is debatable, since he didn't hold the position, though.

I'm sure that "copy and paste" developers exist for most common languages. I've heard from several sources that finding a non-copy-and-paste developer who uses JavaScript is a real rarity. I've also been told that Google in particular is looking for that skill set. Sounds like you could write you own ticket. :)

The book that got me hooked on computers many years ago: "Soul Of A New Machine" http://www.amazon.com/The-Soul-A-New-Machine/dp/0316491977

⬐ ghaff

Still one of the best books out there about getting a product out the door. (Showstopper--about the development of Windows NT--is another.) Of course, I may be biased :-) I worked at Data General for about 13 years. I started a few years after the events of the book but knew many of the people portrayed in it, including Tom West.

⬐ edanm

Haven't read it (still on my shelf), but have you had a chance to read Dreaming in Code? That's the book I would describe as "the best book about getting a product out the door", or not, in this particular case.

⬐ ghaff

I haven't. From the description I'm guessing I would like it. Onto the wishlist :-) Thanks.

+1 for Cryptonomicon. It isn't the easiest book to get through, but it's very worthwhile.

Another couple of possibilities might be:

The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder

http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/03164...

The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage - Clifford Stoll

http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionag...

Hackers & Painters - Paul Graham (yes, that Paul Graham)

http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/dp...

I don't necessarily know of any one book that meets all of your friends requirements, but...

Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine might be good for your friend.

http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/03164...

Another good option might be Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold.

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...

Or, how about Coders at Work?

http://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Programm...

Another one that I have (but haven't had time to read yet) is Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg. It might have something that your friend would find interesting.

http://www.amazon.com/Dreaming-Code-Programmers-Transcendent...

Another one that may be inspirational, although it's more about personalities than computer science per-se, would be Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-Lev...

⬐ pgbovine

thanks for the references! i really appreciate you taking the time to reply to my question.

btw "Dreaming in Code" is the only one of those that I've read, and I don't think it's a good fit for my friend because it's basically the story of software project management gone awry ... hardly inspirational for someone aspiring to learn about the beauty of CS :)

I've always really enjoyed "The Soul of a New Machine" Amazon, non-affiliate: http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/03164...

It's the story of a team of engineers building a new minicomputer, back in the late 70s. I couldn't put it down. He manages to make the politics interesting and the technical details simple.

Coders at Work was very inspiring to me and also gave me the functional programming bug. It seemed like every one of the legends interviewed had something nice to say about Haskell (deserved IMO).

Founders at Work is also great but in some ways more of a business book. If you want to do a startup it is incredibly inspirational.

Another oldie but goodie is Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine. http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/03164...

"A Computer Called LEO" - story of the first commercial computer, used to run Lyons teashops. Fascinating both in terms of computer history, and history in general, especially Lyons' attitude to perfectionism, to the extent of doing many things themselves, that these days would never survive an outsourcing purge.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Computer-Called-LEO-Worlds-Office/dp...

"The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder

Drags a bit in places, but is still interesting in a history type way. It's the story of Data General building a 32-bit minicomputer in a year in the 1970s.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/031...