The most recommended computer books

The first software programmers, or coders for computers, were women. Abbate, a professor at Virginia Tech and author of Inventing the Internet, recaptures the vital role of women programmers at the dawn of digital computing, when in the 1940s and 1950s women often handled what was then viewed as an anonymous task of creating the coding for computers to carry out operations.

“Employed as technical experts from the very beginnings of digital computing,” Abbate writes in her penetrating study, “women were inventing careers and professional identities at the same time that the field took shape.” By the 1960s, when computing spread, men began supplanting women as frontline programmers, a trend that resulted in the software becoming male-dominated by the end of the 20th century. Because women now flock to code writing, and are becoming once more central players in the creation of software, Abbate’s history illuminates a neglected… show more.

From the moment I picked this up, it gripped me.

Virginia Eubanks writes in an incredibly immersive and engaging style, making her book as compulsive as a work of fiction—and equally hard to put down. It exposes the deeply toxic consequences of the way automated decision-making increasingly dominates our public institutions, creating a sort of “twenty-first century digital poorhouse”.

This automated inequality denies citizens their humanity and any sense of agency, condemning them to the sort of negative moral judgments and cycle of decline and despair that would have been familiar to Charles Dickens in his day. 

I fell in love with this book as a young graduate school student at the University of Iowa. Curled up in my tiny 500-square-foot apartment, I devoured the book, not realizing morning had turned into afternoon and then evening.

At a time in the early 2000s when "serious" scholarship largely included Black people using technology in condescending and pathologizing ways, I read Everett sharply responding with counter-evidence of Black publics' involvement at every turn of media developments.

The book, I remember, made me feel like writing a counter-history that places "us" at the center is not only possible but transformational.

Lee covers and connects two of my favorite topics, creativity, and technology. From the facts and truths of technology to the role models play in creativity (looking at how early philosophers suggested modeling thought), he argues that computers are not universal machines and that their power comes from their partnership with humans.

The daughter of a poet and a scientific mother, Ada is shown growing up in the early 1800s with both imagination and a bent toward math. As a girl, she dreams of building a steam-powered flying horse. She’s fascinated by machines and eager to tour factories. Seeing how cards are used to set patterns for cloth on looms inspires her to create the first computer program. Whimsical illustrations adorn clear explanations of calculations. At the book’s end we see Ada in red-striped stockings and green goggles flying over symbols of some of what her ideas will bring to the world.

John Brockman has composed 150 short essays on the dominant question of our time, how is the Internet changing the way you think? This sparked the basis of my book. 

From pessimistic to optimistic views, the experts bring together different perspectives in different fields.

Too early to tell? Is our thinking becoming more shallow? Some say the web is a work of genius and the greatest achievement of the human race.

Lessig lays out his vision for how the Internet should and should not be regulated in easy-to-understand prose that belies a powerful ideology. This book really helped me frame in my own book how new technologies, like the Internet, are approached by regulators and governments. The idea that code cannot be owned, lest it be manipulated, as Lessig states, unlocked a way for me to think and write about how blockchain should be approached as well. 

This weighty tome delves deep into the low-level working of computer programs.

This book is a great resource for professional programmers who work close to the machine in such fields as embedded software, cybersecurity, and device drivers. Assuming a basic knowledge of the C language, Bryant and O’Hallaron, two CMU professors, teach how to read and understand compiled code, how to optimize it for better performance, and how to avoid common pitfalls.

This is a hard-core technical book, written by engineers for engineers, in a dense style that is nonetheless accessible and practical. I like the numerous applied problems, each accompanied by a worked-out solution.

Although strictly speaking, this book is not on software security, it is so well-known in the field as a general reference that it deserves to be on this list. It discusses the important issues of computer security and can be used as either a textbook or a reference. No doubt that many, if not most, students of computer security are familiar with this book.

This book provides a brief introduction to the concept of algorithms before discussing the limitations of computation. Specifically, Harel explains undecidable problems (that is, problems for which no algorithm exists) and infeasible problems (that is, problems for which only algorithms are known that have an exponential runtime). I like this book (and its splendid title) because of its focus on the limitations of computation. Harel does a marvelous job in explaining two difficult topics about computation. The understanding of any scientific discipline requires the understanding of its limits, and the limits of computation are as significant as they are surprising.