Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution
June 14, 2008 - June 22, 2008
Just Finished..

This is another book I read for free online, but I'll probably pick up a used hard copy at some point. It was different in that each chapter was writter by a different author, each being a developer or prominent figure in the open source community. Richard Stallman wrote a chapter on GNU software and the Free Software Foundation he founded in 1984. Michael Tiemann wrote a chapter on his experiences starting one of the first commercial open source companies and his work on the GCC compiler. And of course Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux back in 1991, contribute a chapter on his experiences in starting the Linux kernel project. There are a bunch of other chapters, these were just the ones I enjoyed most. Definitely a book worth checking out if you're a Linux geek.

eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work
March 26, 2008 - Present
Currently Reading..

I needed to find some more books to read during a week off work in early April, so I wandered around my local Half Price Books nearby, and found this one for $4.98 which I'm reading now. It's an inside look into the lives and work of some Silicon Valley venture capitalists at Benchmark Capital. They invested in eBay, Webvan (now famously defunct), and some other billion dollar tech startups you've probably heard of.

Published in 2000, it should be some good nostalgic "Bubble 1.0" reading. I'll post more once I've finished reading it. :)

On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple
March 10 - March 25, 2008

Written by Gil Amelio about his time as CEO of Apple Computer CEO for 17 months in 1996 and early 1997, just before Steve Jobs returned as "interim CEO" (and never left). I really enjoyed this book. For a long time I had thought of Gil's time at Apple as inefectual, like a tech CEO version of the Jimmy Carter presidency. His book gets into the highly disfuctional style that had taken over Apple and the executive staff. I gained a lot of respect for Amelio upon finishing his book. He seems to have had quite an up-hill battle, yet managed to make some headway and had some good ideas. He seems to be a thoughtful, smart man who took on an impossible task and had gave it a valiant effort. I'm still a huge fan of Steve Jobs, but I think Gil was duped and manipulated by Jobs in the end.

One thing I never knew, but learned from Gil's book, was that at one point Microsoft was being considered to create the next generation Macintosh operating system, along with other contenders like Be OS, Solaris (from Sun), and the eventual winner NeXT. Imagine if, instead of the current OS X, we had a Microsoft operating system on Apple machines?! Wild.

Renegades of the Empire: How Three Software Warriors Started a Revolution Behind the Walls of Fortress Microsoft
January 19 - February 29, 2008

I picked this book up from Half Price Books down the street. It's about three developers, Alex St. John, Craig Eisler and Eric Engstrom, the "Beastie Boys", working as Microsoft evangelists in the late 1990's who take on the task of making Windows 95 the top gaming platform over DOS, which still dominated gaming at the time since Windows was too slow graphically. They started DirectX and the book covers the internal and external battles with OpenGL, and how internal groups within Microsoft fight and try to kill off each other's projects, and St. John's craziness and excessive promotional events.

St. John ends up getting himself fired (on purpose), Eisler ends up becoming a manager and behaving himself, and Engstrom starts another project called "Chrome", which is eventually killed off, and sounds remarkably like the new "Silverlight" project Microsoft has been hyping since late 2007. The end of the book also gets into Microsoft's legal troubles with the anti-trust case the Department of Justice and several states brought against them. Engstrom turns out to be the best, of 12, witness for Microsoft in the DoJ trial. It was a pretty cool inside look at the workings of an enormous software company.

Competing on Internet Time: Lessons From Netscape & Its Battle with Microsoft
July 20, 2007 - Present
Still Reading..

As of this writing I am only into the second chapter, but it seems to be a very well researched book from the introduction and what I've read so far. One interesting thing is that this book was written in 1998 when Netscape was still a functioning company, and it's "battle" with Microsoft was still underway and the outcome unknown. Microsoft was also still up to it's eyeballs in its own battle with the U.S. Justice Department, and the outcome of that case was also unknown.

Although we all know what happened in the end, I am always interested in hearing about the details of the story and what happened. Another interesting and well done documentary of a portion of Netscape's history is covered in the VHS documentary "Code Rush" that covers the time leading up to their releasing the web browser code as open source, and being acquired by AOL.

21 Dog Years : Doing Time @ Amazon.com
July 17 - July 20, 2007

This was a great book, and very entertaining. I read it whenever I had some spare time over 4 days. Mike Daisey started at Amazon.com when there were only around 300 other employees there and worked there for a few years in varying job capacities, starting in customer service. He tells the story of his time at the dot-com and gives lots of often funny details you would not hear anywhere else. In the first chapter he talks about being a dilettante and a "slacker", and at times he was describing me, heh.

Mike has a great writing style and sense of humor, and I would highly recommend this book. It's right up there with Microserfs on the badassness scale. :)

Microserfs
July 9 - July 14, 2007

When I started reading this I didn't know that it was fiction, it reads like an actual young geek's recollections in the early to mid 1990's. It's about a group of young Microsoft employees and their life, or lack thereof, on the job, and subsequent tech venture after a group move to Silicon Valley.

The story was great, and the writing style was incredible and sounded like an actual young geek was writing about his daily life at Microsoft and his own startup thereafter. Highly recommended reading! :)

Revolution in the Valley
July 6 - July 17, 2007

The stories in this book were actually started back in the second half of 2003 by Andy Hertzfeld for his web site Folklore.org where he wanted to document, along with help from others that worked on the project, the story of the development of the original Macintosh computer. Andy wrote much of the original operating system and system toolbox in the ROM from 1981 through it's initiale release in early 1984.

Andy is a likeable guy and down to Earth writer, and he relays his stories well. Even if you are not a programmer geek you will probably enjoy this book, since it's not all techno jargon. But for those of us who are code geeks too he does include quite a bit of information on that too. It doesn't bog down the stories though. It's a great read.

Masters of Doom
June 25 - July 4, 2007

I used to play Quake II with the crew back when I worked at a local ISP in Phoenix in 1998, and this book documents the history of id Software and the how it all started. It gives some early background on the founders, John Carmack and John Romero, and how they met while working for Softdisk in Shreveport, Louisiana, and shortly thereafter in late 1990 made a breakthrough with scrolling game graphics and decided to leave and start their own company.

It traces the company and characters through moves from Louisiana to Wisonsin, and how they ended up in Mesquite, Texas (where ID Software still remains), and all of the incredible advances they made with their games and John's game engines along the way. Also covered is John Romero's departure from ID and a big venture, and failure, after. It's a great read if you're into geek history. :)

This was a great book covering the first 3 years of the open-source personal information manager (PIM) application Chandler. Chandler was started by Mitch Kapor who created Lotus 1-2-3 in the 1980's which then dominated spreadsheets and office suites until Microsoft took it over in the 1990's.

The Chandler project was not complete, not even to a 1.0 release, by the time Scott Rosenberg wrote the book. As of today it still is only to a 0.7 beta release version, but is now at least somewhat functional for the calendar. The book gives the inside story of the extensive planning and ideas that went into the start of the project, and follows the delays and personnel changes as the project went on.

Some legendary software people were involved in the project at various points too. Andy Hertzfeld, who authored most of the original Apple Macintosh OS software in the early 1980's, was involved early on and helped get them to choose Python as the application's primary programming language. He had used Python to create his popular site Folklore.org which later was turned into the book Revolution in the Valley.

Rebel Code
February 19, 2007 - May 10, 2007

I was especially interested in this book since I've been running and using Linux since early 1997. It's about the origins of the Linux operating system and the open source software movement that sprung up in the early 1990's, primarily focusing on the Linux community. It was first publiblished in 2000 and later revised in 2001 or 2002, so it's not completely up-to-date, but it covers the history pretty well and it was good reading.

I also learned about quite a few more prominent figures in open source development, like Miguel de Icaza who started the Gnome and Mono projects for Linux. It truly is an interesting story if you're into software development history.

The Art of UNIX Programming
February 2007 - January 17, 2008 (read online at work, on and off for months)

I found this book available to read online for free, so I've been reading through it at work since things have been slow there lately. I'm about half way through at the moment, and so far I'm really enjoying it.

Although, as the title suggests, it's about UNIX programing, it isn't a text one would read to learn programming. There aren't many code examples in it either. The book gives some background on the UNIX community and how it has developed since UNIX and the C programming language were conceived by Dennis Ritchie in 1969 at Bell Labs.

The author, Eric S. Raymond, states in the beginning that the book is meant to explain the how and why about UNIX development and how it compares to some other popular platforms. He also covers the Linux and open-source community quite a bit too. I'll re-write this once I finish the book.

The Cathedral & the Bazaar
January - February, 2007 (read online at work)

I read this book online for free, but enjoyed it so much I plan to order the paper version soon. I usually prefer printed books over reading them online, but I was looking for something to read during slow points at work and happened upon this book while searching online.

The book is fairly short, and the author, Eric S. Raymond, discusses how the open-source community has evolved and why it has become so successful in developing great projects. He focuses quite a bit on Linus Torvalds and how he developed Linux from a personal project based on Minix into a major operating system maintained by lots of programmers all over the world.

Update: I finally bought a hardcover copy for $5.98 I found at my local Half Price Books on 03/23/2008. Yay!

Digital Retro

This book has lots of great high quality photos of old computers. But for some unknown reason it also includes some data and photos on console gaming machines from the 90's.. Not sure why though.

The book was written and published in the U.K., so there are a number of errors, but overall the full-color photos of the classic computers make up for it. I wish the author, or at least his editor, would have done a little more research though. Some of the errors are common knowledge among geeks and should have been fixed before printing.

On pages 11 and 13 the author repeatedly refers to "Practical Electronics" instead of the correct "Popular Mechanics" as the magazine that introduced the ALTAIR on its cover in 1975. They even italisize the error in each instance, d'oh. :)

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Purchased on July 13, 2006 from Amazon.com

This book was great, I should have read it a long time ago. It was published in 1985 when I was learning to program BASIC on my Atari 800XL with the Atari 1010 cassette tape drive for storage since since I couldn't afford a floppy disk drive. :)

Hackers covers the history (up until 1985 anyway) of computers from a different angle than any other book I've read on it, starting with the "Tech Model Railroad Club" (TMRC) at MIT back in the mid-1950's.

From their beginnings hacking on an old TX-0 and later a DEC PDP-1, he follows their eventual path into business and their conflicts with remaining true to the "Hacker Ethic".

Also interesting is how the whole computer game industry began. It's an interesting story, and the industry seems to have began almost by accident, programming in assembly language for the early Apple II and Atari computers. But soon it became big business as expected, and several companies and developers are covered.

This is a great book. I found my used hardcover copy on Amazon.com pretty cheap. Pick it up if you see it in a used book store.

Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents

Ellen Ullman writes well for a software engineer. Although I think it's non-fiction, this book almost reads like a fiction story in a way.

It's a peek into the life of a software engineer working in the still young web and dot-com world. Her inner conflict between her former communist beliefs and the acquisition of material wealth in Silicon Valley, while trying to work on projects that help people instead of just for the pursuit of money, is interesting too.

Fire in the Valley
Purchased on December 9, 2003 from Amazon.com

This was a great book. Covering the MITS Altair through the development of the Apple machines, IBM PC, the PC clones, and right up to the "browser wars" of the later 1990's. Lots of anecdotal stuff on the history of the development of the personal computer industry.

One of my favorite things about this book that sets it apart from the others is the 64 glossy pages of black and white photos of everything from the old ENIAC, the Altair, various characters in the book, Woz and Apple, Microsoft, and even the schematic to the original Apple I machine. Very cool stuff. :)

The Silicon Boys

This book covers the story of computer companies in "the valley" (Silicon Valley) in California and how several huge fortunes were amassed. Venture Capitalists, CEOs, and other rich geeks are profiled.

I dig how the author even goes into Woodside, California, where many of the movers and shakers of Silicon Valley live, and gets into their lives outside of their .coms at home.

dot.bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath
Purchased June 6, 2002 from Amazon.com

This is a real story of Craig Wynn and the rise and fall of a "dot-com" during the first "bubble." It was interesting reading the first hand accounts of the incredible juggling act they performed to try to build a huge company based on a new idea and way of doing business. The struggle to get more and more financial backing, then burning through the cash with little to show for it, and eventual collapsing of the house of cards they had built. The story is probably very similar to hundreds of other dot-com's of the bubble era in the late 1990's. I myself worked for three dot-com companies that went bankrupt during the second half of the 1990's, so it was interesting to me since I had lived through some it at my own companies.

StrikingitRich.Com: Profiles of 23 Incredibly Successful Websites You've Probably Never Heard Of

If you've ever wanted to start a dot-com business this book is some interesting reading. The profiles include a lot more than just the technical or business stuff other books cover. This one gets a little more into the story of each company and the people that started the companies.

Published in 1999, this book was written before the dot-com "crash". Things were still relatively new, and the possibilities and excitement for starting up new dot-com ideas was still running high. It's good reading, and you can even learn something from some of the sites profiled.

NetSlaves: True Tales of Working the Web

Having worked for dot-com's from 1996 through 2002 and as a contractor with a dot-com till 2004, I really enjoyed this book. There's some humor and a lot of truth in it, and it tells the story of quite a variety of different types of dot-com workers (the "net slaves").

The author assigns various humorous titles to the types and classes of workers: Garbagemen, Cops and Streetwalkers, Social Workers, Cab Drivers, Cowboys and Card Sharks, Fry Cooks, Gold Diggers and Gigolos, Priests and Madmen, Robots, Robber Barrons, and Mole People. This is good stuff, you should check it out.

Masters of Deception
~2001

This is an interesting and fun book covering the exploits and unauthorized phone system exploration by some New York computer crackers in the late 1980's and early 1990's. It covers people like "Phiber Optik" (aka Mark Abene) and many others, including some Austin, Texas hackers (where I'm from now) of the time too. Kinda cool.

If you're in your 30's or early 40's, and were into computers back then, you might remember groups like "MOD" and "LOD". This book tells their story and it's some interesting reading.

Eniac
~2000

I read this book shortly after moving to Austin for work in early 2000. Being a programmer the history of computers has always interested me.

This is good reading, if you're into it. It covers the saga of Presper Eckert and John Mauchly creating the first electronic digital computer in the 1940's. It's pretty interesting reading. We take for granted how we can buy a "stick of RAM" that has 512mb on it for the price of a few cases of beer these days. Back in the day these guys were figuring out how in the hell do you store things electronically at all, it had never been done before. Vaccum tubes were used since solid-state electronics using transistors was years away, and silicon chips containing multiple transistors was a couple of decades or more away. Amazing stuff indeed.

The Fugitive Game
~2000 (After I moved to Austin)

This book, written by Jonathan Littman, gives the other view of the Kevin Mitnick story. Jonathan was in contact with Kevin during his time on the run, and also provides quite a bit of background on his life in addition to the events leading up to his capture in 1995.

I really enjoyed this book more than Takedown.

Although law enforcement and the media painted him as a cyber-terrorist and dangerous criminal, it seems he was mostly a computer addict who had no respect for other people's digital privacy. A bastard and thoughtless fucker yes, but major criminal causing millions of dollars in damage I think not.

Takedown

This book was written by Tsutomu Shimomura, a computer scientist at the University of California at San Diego. His SUN workstations at home and at his office were hacked into by Kevin Mitnick while on the run from the FBI. He had cell phone software Mitnick wanted on his computers.

For the most part this book is a self-serving and ego-stroking account of the part he played in helping track down Mitnick after his computers were broken into and his source code copied.

The movie Track Down was created based in 2000 on this one-sided account of the events of Mitnick's persuit and capture in 1995. Although not entirely factual the movie is pretty entertaining anyway, I bought the DVD.

CyberPunk
~1998

This book covers three different "hackers" (more acurately, "crackers"), and their exploits.

The first section deals with Kevin Mitnick, once occupying a spot on the FBI's Most Wanted list. Our Federal geniuses kept him in solitary confinement because they thought he could whistle into a phone and launch nukes. Yes, it's true. Our Federal servants are just that stupid.

The second section covers the exploits of a lesser known German cracker named "Pengo".

Robert Tappan Morris, aka "RTM", is covered in the third section. He became famous in for unleashing a "worm" on the ARPAnet (early Internet) that ended up taking down a huge amount of computers and hosts on the network.

The Hacker Crackdown
~1997

I started reading this book, the free online version, back in late 1997 or early 1998 during my short (3 month) tenure at Inficad Computing & Design in between tech support calls. I enjoyed it, so I purchased the book and finished reading it the old fashined way in paperback form. Trying things for free is cool, but if you enjoy something it's cool to compensate the creator.

Another cool thing about this book was that it covered Operation Sundevil which happened in Arizona in 1990. Since I was living in Phoenix at the time I read this, and at the time of Operation Sundevil, and my old man worked for AT&T and the Bell System most of his working life, it made it all the more interesting.