10 Books for Technologists' Holiday Wishlists
December 10, 2015 1:00 PM
James Kaplan, a principal in McKinseys New York office and one of the authors of Wiley & Sons Beyond Cybersecurity: Protecting Your Digital Business, recently posted a list of the books that influenced him as a business technologist. The list, with some of his comments on the books, follows.
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, by Charles Petzold
I dont have a background in electrical engineering, and this book helped me get beneath the logical to the physical layers in the stack
. Having read this book, you wont be able to design circuits, but youll be able to understand how circuits get designed. --Kaplan
Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Cant Get a Date, by Robert X. Cringely
Yes, Cringely touches on some many-told tales, but he also delves into aspects of the technology industry that few talk about. Just one example: how Microsoft [built] a software factory that hired thousands of inexperienced computer-science majors to build the world-conquering applications of the 1980s and 1990s. --Kaplan
The Reckoning, by David Halberstam
Why is this an important technology book? Because it provides a cautionary tale of many of the pitfalls business technologists must avoid. --Kaplan
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward Tufte
Think of a newspaper front page. You can scan all the headlines, then look at the sub-headlines for interesting articles, and then decide whether to read the first few paragraphs. Fortunately, the same type of layered structure can be used to communicate the business case for new initiative or project. --Kaplan
Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle, by Stephen Biddle
Breakthrough value in business technology seems to depend on how organizations can employ people and technology in a coherent and consistent fashion. One could even ask if theres a modern system for enterprise IT that combines agile, lean, service orientation, and other practices. --Kaplan
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon, by Neil Sheehan
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War provides fascinating insights into how
Schriever and his team convinced the Eisenhower administration to bet on a generational leap from bombers to missiles." --Kaplan
Why the Allies Won, by Richard Overy
Any IT executive who has argued that his or her servers must be configured just so should read the passages comparing how the Red Army deployed a few types of trucks and tanks at scale, even as Wehrmacht infighting resulted in a hard-to-maintain array of vehicles. --Kaplan
The Cuckoos Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, by Cliff Stoll
It provides an invaluable reminder that protecting sensitive information depends far more on the ability to ask intelligent questions than on the latest and most loudly promoted security tools. Kaplan
Show Stopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft, by G. Pascal Zachary
Zacharys book provides an all-but-unique window into the mechanics of a complicated, expensive, multiyear development effort. --Kaplan
Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost
Montfort and Bogosts
creativity and problem solving is an inspiration to technologists struggling to deliver compelling user experiences with todays far more advanced platforms. --Kaplan
