Book Review: Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

Petros Koutoupis — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 13:08:08 +0000

I don't know where to begin—and I mean that in a very positive way. I can best describe Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) as a "literary documentary". The book provides a sort of oral history of the Valley from the legends who built it.

The author, Adam Fisher, grew up in Silicon Valley. He continues to live in the Bay Area, so he's been exposed to many of the early technologies created in the region. He eventually became a computer programmer and writer, writing for Wired magazine and other publications. Valley of Genius is his first book, but he wrote very little of it—and he didn't need to do much more than piece together the many interviews he conducted to form a wonderful and continuous narrative that begins as early as the 1950s.

The story starts off with the very first computer that was more than just a super calculator created by Doug Engelbart. With a small team, he built a prototype: the oN-Line System, or NLS. It even was equipped with a "mouse"! The story continues on to the first video games manufactured by Nolan Bushnell and company in their pre-Atari days.

The book also details how, in parallel, Engelbart's prototype inspired the computers of the future developed at Xerox PARC, while the Spacewar video game would motivate a young Steve Wozniak not only to help Steve Jobs create video games for the later Atari, but also eventually to build the original Apple computer.

The narrative progresses with the birth of Apple, the company, was born and took the world of personal computing by storm—at least initially. What followed was an emotional roller coaster. The Apple II was a success, and up until Jobs looked to Alan Kay's visions preserved in the Xerox Alto, Apple continued to fail, but then later turned it all around with the Macintosh, as the story goes.

The book covers the evolving hardware (and software), and how the culture it nurtured evolved along with it. It explores how the early versions of the internet connected the youngest and brightest, and how ideas were shared—all of them centered around the concept of openness.

It looks at how passionate people started flame wars, and how publications, such as Wired, captured those times and emotions best. The book explores how Wired also rode the internet wave by shifting some of that focus toward its HotWired website. It considers the early days of the internet, at a time when it was all research and bulletin-board systems (or BBSes), and the problem of how to navigate this new World Wide Web. It describes how early web browsers, such as Mosaic and Netscape Navigator (the Mosaic killer or Mozilla), solved this need—and with it, helping to open the internet to more users.

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2013 Book Roundup

Reuven Lerner — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 17:44:54 +0000

by Reuven Lerner

I'm always amazed to hear about the death of the publishing industry. True, books and (gulp) magazines are often fighting for their lives, and the state of journalism is in tatters. But at the same time, we continue to see a large number of high-quality books being published. This past year was no exception; I read many books that really enlightened me, giving me new ideas in areas of technology, business and life in general.

So as I do at roughly this time every year, here's a roundup of the most interesting books I've read during the last year. This is not a representative sample; it reflects a combination of books that I bought and received for review, generally because I saw or noticed them. I expect there are many good books I haven't read, but that just means they'll likely be on the list for next year. This also means there almost certainly are some books on this list that I saw for the first time in the past year, but which were published before then.

Programming Languages

As someone who develops software on a regular basis, and also teaches programming to a large number of people, programming languages still are a subject that I enjoy reading and learning about. The languages I use most often—Ruby, Python and JavaScript—are the subjects of a constant stream of books, many of which are no longer simple tutorials, but explorations of specific topics that will be of interest to many developers working with the language.

Python for Data Analysis by Wes McKinney (O'Reilly, ISBN: 978-1-449-31979-3) is an introduction to manipulating data with two well-known Python libraries, NumPy (for numeric analysis and some highly efficient data structures) and Pandas (for data analysis). Reading through the description of these libraries reminded me greatly of the excellent R language for data analysis and manipulation, as well as the relational algebra that we know (and love!) in SQL. The advantage of Pandas is that it allows you to integrate the analysis into a language you are already using, rather than having to learn a new one. The book is full of examples and practical hints; if you ever have wanted to learn how to analyze, manipulate and plot your data, this is a great way to get started, in an excellent and readable language.

Python is remarkable in numerous ways, among them the fact that it is an excellent language for beginning programmers, as well as for experienced professionals. Jason Briggs has written Python for Kids (No Starch Press, ISBN: 978-1593274078), which introduces programming to children aged ten and up through playful examples, including GUI-based programs using the Tk library. The use of child-friendly examples and humor (for example, "Want to hear a dirty joke? A pig fell in the mud!") makes me want to re-start the programming lessons that I've given my own children.

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Book Reviews

Book Review: Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

2013 Book Roundup

Programming Languages