10 of 10.
I'm only 16 years late on this one. This book is about DG's race to build a machine to contend with DEC's VAX, and has some great story telling. It reads almost like a fiction book, with great character building, a nice storyline running through the book, etc. The geek factor is low on this one, though I suppose it _is_ a book about a bunch of geeks building hardware, so it's a little up there. Evidently it won the Pulitzer prize.

10 of 10.
Another one in the category of "how the heck did I not read this sooner?" This book is a collection of essays on various programming tasks, and gives tons of insight on engineering software in general. The prose is even entertaining too. This book now occupies a special place on my bookshelf.

10 of 10.
This is a very down-to-earth, pragmatic overview of concurrency in Java. It even has chapters on testing and debugging, which get very little coverage in most articles but are clearly important. Though its focus is on Java, many of the ideas are more general, and thus it's a must-read for any serious Windows or .NET concurrency programmer. It's not as good as my upcoming book, but given that you can't buy mine yet, it will do for now ;).

8 of 10.
I'm sure everybody who reads my blog reads Raymond's too. If you do, then the book will be quite familiar to you. It's a collection of essays, most of which are edited versions of ones that have appeared on Raymond's blog in the past. I really like the layout and organization of chapters. One downside: Raymond apparently tried to keep it from becoming too geeky (he mentions several times, "for you non-programmers, you can skip this chapter"), but c'mon: how many non-programmers are actually going to read this book? IMHO he should have just let loose and never looked back.

8 of 10.
This book is a collection of classic articles by precisely what the book's title suggests, software pioneers: Friedrich L. Bauer (ALGOL), Ole-Johan Dahl (Simula), Niklaus Wirth (Pascal), Fred Brooks (Mythical Man Month, OS/360), Alan Kay (GUIs), Rudolf Bayer (B-trees), Peter Chen (E/R modeling), Edsger Dijkstra (obvious), Tony Hoare (CSPs, axiomatic semantics), David Parnas, John Guttag (abstract data types), Michael Jackson (JSP), Tom DeMarco (structured analysis), Michael Fagan (code inspection), Barry Boehm (engineering economics) and Erich Gamma (design patterns). Most of the papers are available on the net, but having them in a printed hardcover is really nice. There are also some new write-ups and an accompanying CD which contains talks from all of the above people. Nice.

8 of 10.
An overview of Timothy Budd's APL compiler, from front to back end. (For those not up on APL, it's a great language. See the next item.) Also contains a chapter on compiling high level program statements to vector ISAs, which is quite timely and interesting.

8 of 10.
This is the best overview and reference book on APL I've encountered to date. For $120, you get the cheesiest binding and printing ever, so be prepared to be disappointed in that department, but the content is well worth it. Covers APL from start to finish and has some handy reference charts.

8 of 10.
I picked this book up after reading Larry Osterman's blog entry about how acquiring a critical section in OS/2 effectively suspended all threads in the system until it was released. Sure enough, that's how it worked. Funny. Anyway, this book was fun because it takes you back in time, and, since Gordon was the chief architect for OS/2, the writing gives a ton of insight into software design and architecture when OS/2 was being developed. Though there is plenty of detail which is fairly useless today (like how to specifically use DosCWait), I enjoyed skimming it.

7 of 10.
In the style of Soul of a New Machine (see above), this book takes you through the development of Chandler, a start -up software project lead by Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus. I generally agree with most of the reviews on Amazon: the book idea was good, the writing is very good, but the project he chose to follow was crap. As far as I know, Chandler is now dead, and the start-up didn't seem like a place buzzing with immensely passionate people, no matter how hard the author tried to convey that. He should have chosen Windows Vista or something ;).

10 of 10.
This is THE book on molecular gastronomy, literally. Hervey basically invented the field, from what I understand, and this book is a great collection of easy-to-read essays on the topic. You'll walk away with a better scientific understanding of what cooking is all about, including how various new-age techniques work, and perhaps even the confidence to try some of it out on your own. This is a must read for any serious food geek.

10 of 10.
In this book, the author enrolls at the Cullinary Institute of America (CIA) and goes through basically the full cirriculum. The book is written excellently, and you feel like you're right there in class with him. And you certainly walk away with a deep and lucid appreciation for those who are slaves to the knife, cooking up delicious food because they love it. I was considering a stint at the CIA ... until I read this ... I'm now convinced that I couldn't handle it ;).

10 of 10.
So many of you probably don't know that I'm a music geek too. I write a lot of material -- actually, I've been writing a whole lot more lately -- though I don't play live at all anymore. This book has some light introduction to music theory, but the great part is the way the author dives into cognitive neuroscience and the effect of music on people, their brains, and their psychology. The book is incredibly unique and will instill a newfound appreciation of every nuance of that next breakbeat you hear.

10 of 10.
Great follow-up to The Making of a Chef. The delves into the make-up of a chef, starting with the master chef exam at the CIA, and then profiling two chefs: Michael Symon (Lola) and Thomas Keller (French Laundry, per se). While the whole thing is great, the 1/3 of the book devoted to Thomas Keller makes the book wortwhile.

10 of 10.
I couldn't put this book down for a whole weekend, and then I was sad when it was done. The writing is extraordinary, and makes you feel like you're there, learning to make various pastas, to be a line cook at Babbo in New York, to try and learn what you can from Mario, and to travel to Italy to learn from some very interesting characters indeed. Easily one of my favorite reads from 2006.

9 of 10.
After reading Kitchen Confidential, I couldn't not read A Cook's Tour. Anthony is extremely entertaining, crude, and raw. That's what he does best. This is the book version of his late TV show with the same title. In it, he travels the world, tasting regional cuisines and reporting "from the trenches". Lots of mouth watering street food, bizzare encounters, exotic beverages, etc. If you can't afford to do a foodie world-tour yourself, this is the next best thing.

9 of 10.
This book needs little introduction. It won the Pulitzer prize, after all. The book describes how certain socieites came to dominate various geographies of the world, including (as the title suggests) the role of guns, germs (disease), and steel in the process. For obvious reasons, the writing is a tad dry, but it's so jam packed full of interesting data and written incredibly methodically, both of which more than make up for the dryness.

9 of 10.
This book takes you through many different forms of eating, from corn and our new industrialized food system, to farming, to hunting and foraging, and beyond. Each section concludes with a meal characteristic of one particular style of food creation. Though at times the writing gives a hint of an agenda, the writing is generally excellent, and many facts are presented for consideration.

8 of 10.
This is the third of Ruhlman's XXX of a Chef series of books, and I really enjoyed it. This one looks at chefs and their influence inside and outside of the kitchen. That includes Grant Achatz (of Alinea), how he studied under Keller and became an American pioneer of molecular gastronomy, various Food TV celebs, and so on. Great read.

8 of 10.
Sometime in 2005, I stumbled across the archive of Warren Buffet's letters to the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, dating back to 1977. I immediately printed them all out and have a stack of many 1,000 pages in my office to this day. Though they are fairly lengthy, there are many great lessons to be learned from reading them. This book is an edited down version of those essays. Very edited and abridged, actually, but some of the more important points are pulled out and analyzed. And the best part is that if you want to drill into more detail, all of the letters are available online.

7 of 10.
All wine lovers need to read this. I gave it 7 out of 10 simply because the writing style is actually pretty bad IMHO. But the content itself is great, and of historical signifciance. Wikipedia has a page on the event, but in summary, in 1976 many Bordeaux 1st growths, etc. were pitted against various California winemakers in a blind tasting. The tasting was held in Paris, and the judges were all French. Everybody believed the US wines would fall short, but it turned out that the US fared quite well: the book is the story of events leading up to and including this tasting.

7 of 10.
To be entirely honest, this book was VERY entertaining, but fell a bit short of my expectations. This is a collection of fairly disjoint essays, almost the kind of thing you'd expect to see on a blog. Each reads very well on its own, but it lacked the kind of cohesive feel I was looking for. Nevertheless, Anthony is always entertaining, crude, funny, and makes me laugh. This book was no exception.

10 of 10.
I read this book in nearly one sitting. I couldn't put it down. This book details the story of the conception, design, and implementation of the Windows NT OS. It's a great "from the trenches" report of what it must have been like to work on the project, and stars many familiar faces, not the least of which is Dave Cutler. Some DevDiv familiar show up, such as David Treadwell (was dev on WinSock, now VP for the .NET Framework) and S. Somasegar (was tester, now VP for DevDiv), among many Windows core architects who are still at the company today. It's out of print, but I found a like-new copy for a few bucks (yaay).

10 of 10.
λ! Who am I to rate such a classic book? This is the seminal work for all modern functional languages (LISP is modern, yes?). I had to read it twice... carefully... to follow everything. (Perhaps I'm slow?) But it's only 77 pages. The text covers α conversion, β reduction, and η conversion, in addition to normal and head normal forms. And the best part of all? It's very concise, not very wordy, and follows a nice, natural progression.

8 of 10.
This book is fun. It's a bit lighter on the math than I'd prefer, but nevertheless offers a great historical insight into the evolution of probability. It begins in the 1600s, and details its origins in mathematics and science, and -- surprise! -- its practical use as a tool for gamblers. Eventually it discusses impacts to more interesting parts of society, such as the development of an insurance industry, evaluation of new drugs, and combat and war. A welcome break from my typical computer nerd books.

8 of 10.
Ahhh, a book after my heart. A quote from the opening says it all:

I used to think math was no fun
'Cause I couldn't see how it was done
Now Euler's my hero
For I now see why zero
Equals e^πi + 1

The book details the historical development and importance of Euler's formula. Throughout, there is quite a bit of description-by-example by way of complex number mathematics, in addition to great historical accounts.

7 of 10.
First, let me admit: I was a little disappointed by the broad title and relative narrow focus of the text. While some correlation is drawn between evolution, extinction, and economics, most of the book is spent describing why uncertainty in business--and the aparrent disregard for such uncertainty in commonplace naive business theory--leads to failure. He also uses examples from game theory on other related topics to draw such conclusions. The book should have been much longer, as I found myself at the end wondering, did I miss some big pieces? With that said, much of it is unique content backed by real research, so I'm sure developing the ideas took quite a bit of time.

6 of 10.
I don't think I learned a whole lot from this particular book, but it was at least entertaining to read. I brought it along with me on a trip, and liked the format: Short, concise, often under 5-page essays on some topic in computer science. While I was traveling, this enabled me to pick it up and read an entire essay when I had only a brief period of time. The topics do range quite dramatically, and the content is a little "dumbed down," but it is a great coffee table addition.

8 of 10.
OK, this is definitely the odd book out. But I read it in about a day and a half, last weekend, and couldn't put it down. The book really isn't as much about coffee as it is about the author's crazy travels from Africa to Yemen to Europe and back to the US, in search of the "local brews." Quite a bit of historical insight is given, and it's a fun ride. I enjoyed it, and it was a much needed break from the techno babble and funny symbols. :)

10 of 10.
I can't believe I never got my hands on this puppy previously. After seeing Mark and David's pre-con at PDC this year, I had to run out and buy it. Yes, I read it like a novel. And yes, it was just as suspenseful and enjoying. If you want to learn more about Windows esoterica--including memory management, thread scheduling, I/O, and various other internals--this is the best book on the market. At least the best one I've seen so far. I can't say enough about it.

8 of 10.
(I've owned this book for years, but picked it up for a re-read. I was surprised at how much new I gleaned from it.) OK, Eric Raymond is known as a complete MS-basher. But this book is quite well written. He makes tons of interesting claims, backed up with logical arguments (albeit little data), and challenges the traditional viewpoint on software development economics. He does so from more of an anthropologists view rather than an economist, but he does surprisingly well mixing the two. You can find a digital copy right here if you're too cheap to buy the book. ;)

6 of 10.
This is probably a good book to have, and to skim through. I personally only read about 1/5th of it (those that were relevant and contained information I wasn't already entirely comfortable with) but the sections I did go through were well written. It covers various "virtual machines," from virtual execution environments--e.g. CLR and JVM--to hypervisors and more traditional virtualization (a la VirtualPC and VMWare). The content is, unfortunately, quite introductory in nature.

8 of 10.
Wow, super entertaining. This book talks about all of the foods throughout history which have been labeled "forbidden," yet for some reason always seemed to be secretly enjoyed by the more privileged classes in certain societies. Its chapters are broken up into the Deadly Sins, leading to some surprising and definitely engaging narratives throughout various cultures. I blew through this in just two sittings, mostly because it's an easy read, but also because I couldn't put it down.

8 of 10.
OK, so this book is about food. A really good book about food. Anthony Bourdain did a brief stint as a "celebrity chef," but ultimately he's just a raw all-American cook. He is executive chef as Brasserie Les Halles in New York City. And his book details the grungy side of kitchens and the restaurant industry, but in a very intruiging and culinary-rich sense. I read it on the beach in Maui, which made it even better.

7 of 10.
This is an enligntening tale of one man's journey through the world of wine. At first, he is confronted with a dizzying array of magical words thrown together by "experts" on taste and wine, and struggles to find his ground. Over time, a subtle transformation takes place, where the comfort level with the industry, influentials, and its products gradually rises. No strong conclusion is made, but the journey is fun.

9 of 10.
I am thouroughly enjoying this one. It takes a historical tour of the design and evolution of the C++ language, from it's inception based on Bjarne's work with Simula in the late 70's, to his C with Classes, it's codification as C++, and its evolution from 1.0 and beyond. Great insight into why certain decisions were made, and a great way to get some context around where we are today and how we got here.

9 of 10.
A fairly detailed tour of the parallel processing space, with some practical advice as it pertains to modern shared memory architectures and systems. I mentioned it a few weeks back, but I'm just now reading straight through the book. Material is introduction-to-medium-level, but offers some meaty chunks (whatever that means...it just came out, sorry) in many areas. Especially good coverage on data dependence analysis.

8 of 10.
I bought this book primarily for its coverage of Constrained Execution Regions, Critical Finalization, and reliability as it pertains to our hosting APIs. But then I started reading from the beginning and couldn't stop. This book will certainly serve as a good reference for anybody doing hosting coding, and could serve as a source of endless hours of fun...just toying around with some of the cool extensibility hooks the CLR provides. Happy hacking!

7 of 10.
Despite it's potentially offensive title, this book offers interesting insight from an Indian programmer working in the United States. Funny, entertaining, and very raw (i.e. little to no editing). I am slightly annoyed by the triple spaced typesetting, but so be it. Definitely a lighter read than my norm, but it's a welcome change.

9 of 10. This book builds on one of my favorite reads from last year, Types and Programming Languages. It contains a collection of essays on topics ranging from precise type analysis, lower level type systems (e.g. a typed assembly language), reasoning about programs, and ML type inferencing. I've not yet completed it, but it is generally very well written. I highly recommend both of these books.

8 of 10. Fascinating read by one of the most knowledgeable and provocative experts on the topic of both historical and modern intellectual property. This book takes a careful look (without too much lawyer speak) at the impacts IP law have had on culture as a whole, and examines the impacts on the future of ideas and the ability to act out on such creativity. Lawrence has a blog over at http://www.lessig.org/blog/, and has a great collection of presentations over at the IT Conversations website.

7 of 10. This is a fun book. While some of the topics covered aren't necessarily hacks, the author's do a great job of discussing some interesting facets of how the brain functions. While coverage doesn't go very deep in any one area, the book provides plenty of (mostly web) references to follow up on if you end up wanting more details. The prose is very computer/geekish which just adds to the reading pleasure.

8 of 10. Discussion of game theory with concrete examples in terms of politics, war, and economics. This is a reprint of the classic 1957 text, and is highly dependent on von Neumann's extensive work in this area. Includes a great deal on classification, e.g. two-person, n-person, zero-sum, and cooperative, and the related strategic theories. Also discusses general decision making based on interests, including both at an individual and group level, with much content derived from Nash's relavent work. The book is also very approachable, leaving much of the heavy duty math to von Neumann's classic Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. A fun deviation from my typical CS read.

10 of 10. Contains a pragmatic view of language typing by using formal operational semantics. It begins with an untyped lambda calculus and moves to simply-typed on up through more complex language syntax. The text is very well organized, introducing new topics in a logical progression from untyped to fully typed language syntax. The book uses ML to demonstrate example implementations along the way.

9 of 10. This is a very mathematically-oriented text on formal mechanisms for representing programming language semantics. Includes coverage of domain theory, and operational, denotational, and natural semantics, plus special coverage of parallel and nondeterministic formalisms. Very dense, but very well written.

6 of 10. Decent, albeit introductory and very sparse, coverage of various computer (hardware) architecture topics. This includes coverage of instruction set design, parallelism, pipelining, multi-core, and a variety of other interesting things. The biggest disappointment is the lack of depth in the topics covered. Still recommended as a quick reference to occupy your bookshelf.

10 of 10. Details fundamental programming language concepts with a focus on the implementation of them, including closures, type checking, continuations, object orientation, and the like. The book gives a great overview, building a functional interpreter using Scheme along the way to illustrate and highlight points. There is just the right amount of formal notation. Highly recommended.

10 of 10. The Wizard book. Although it's available for free online, I ended up buying a copy. This is a classic book on fundamental concepts of programming, with a heavy focus on Scheme and functional programming constructs. Anyone who doesn't already own it... well... should. :)

9 of 10. An amazing collection of essays covering the spectrum of Turing's life. Not super-geeky, but nonetheless a fascinating set of pieces. I've been interested in Turing ever since I read The Code Book: The Evolution Of Secrecy From Mary, Queen Of Scots To Quantum Crytography years and years ago, a historical account of cryptography with a decent coverage of his attempts and eventual success to break the ENIGMA.

8 of 10. This is the classic text on Ruby, the programming language. This is referred to the "PickAxe" among the Ruby crowd. The first edition has been out of print for some time, so the recent re-release of a second edition is very welcome! Not only has it been updated to cover Ruby 1.8, but it has much more content than the first edition. Great book, especially for reference. (Ruby isn't known for its great documentation!)

7 of 10. This book is a brief tour of the Haskell programming language, using multimedia examples to illustrate a variety of potential uses. I found it a bit too geared towards the functional language beginner. The focus on multimedia was interesting, albeit distracting at times.

10 of 10. This book is easily within the select few books that I've enjoyed 150%, page for page. The general topic of heuristic-based problem solving strategies is discussed, including search- and network-based solution techniques, evolutionary approaches, along with plenty of fundamental information on problems, modeling, and the process of devising solutions. I felt engaged throughout, constantly presented with example problems to keep my brain active. Although some relatively elementary math is used to express concepts, the book is surprisingly easy to read (considering the density and depth of the material covered).

Just as a teaser, I'll go ahead and offer up one of the simplistic examples found early in the book:

Mr. Smith and his wife invited four other couples for a party. When everyone arrived, some of the people in the room shook hands with some of the others. Of course, nobody shook hands with their spouse and nobody shook hands with the same person twice.

After that, Mr. Smith asked everyone how many times they shook someone's hand. He received different answers from everybody.

How many times did Mrs. Smith shake someone's hand?

8 of 10. This was a gift, and was read within a couple days of receiving it. The book is basically a novel that reads like a pathetic Microsoft employee's journal. He and his friends decide to be not-so-pathetic, and decide to join a 90's-style start-up, but still end up being pathetic. I'm still unsure what sucked me in, as I'm typically not a fan of works of fiction, but perhaps it was the truthfulness of the Microsoft cultural references that did me in. It's a bit frightening when a fictional book reads as though it's a diary of your own life... oh, and it was written ~10 years ago! Now, I'd like to think that I'm not as sad as the characters in the story, but perhaps I'm in denial? ;)

7 of 10. For that spreadsheet-oriented part of your brain. Covers some fairly straightforward (duhh) concepts that, as in most books written on topics of business and management matters, should be obvious but often aren't. And no, this book doesn't advocate for eliminating risk entirely, quite the opposite actually. Which is why I found it interesting: it is primarily about managing and mitigating the negative consequences that could result from making (and managing the implementation of) risky decisions.

7 of 10. Most of this material is available right on Joel's weblog, but for those who prefer killing trees (which I do, not for the killing trees part but rather the yet-to-be-widely-understood preferable feeling of holding a book in one's hands) this was worth it. His style of writing gives some people heartburn, but if you take it for what it is, it's enjoyable. So what is it? Well, a collection of op-ed pieces on technology from somebody with a respectable amount of experience and success in the software industry. Luckily, you can get a good taste of his style by reading his weblog and be at ease knowing the book is significantly less expensive than your average book covering the subject of computers.

9 of 10. A classic tale of foolish mistakes that have sunk entire software- product units and/or companies over the years. I burst out laughing several times, and still can't believe that many of the stories are true. I find that learning from other peoples' mistakes is often more valuable than digesting theoretical prose, especially when it comes to business advice. This book serves that purpose perfectly.

8 of 10. A very well-written historical account of the software industry, and (imho) an indispensable resource for attempting to understand where we've been and where we're going. This fell into the category of "once you start, you just can't put it down"... for me, at least.

I bought this several years back (2001, I think), but just picked it up again for a read. It describes the concept of emergence, that is, when given an aggregate, the capabilities (far) surpass the sum of the capabilities of its individual parts. For example, consider ant colonies, in which individual ants are making decisions in isolation based on an extremely limited capacity for analysis and thought. When viewed in the aggregate (colony), however, each ant appears to be contributing to an extremely coordinated, thoughtful, and strategic mass. The author here attempts to be clever on too many ocassions, and the applications to technology are a bit stretched (IMHO). However, it lead me to look deeper into the behavior of ant colonies, and as such was a good “gateway“ read.

Read this now. This book focuses on algorithmic techniques for approximation of NP-hard/complete problems, in particular Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). Out of disorder, chaos, and localized decision making, the simulation of ant behavior to attack classic NP-hard algorithms causes fascinating new approaches to problem solving and new approximate solutions to emerge. This is one of the best reads in a while.

Awesome read, covering various broad strategies to solving "hard" problems. Discusses deterministic, approximation, randomized, and heuristic approaches, at the same time providing realistic enough examples that the tradeoffs between each is made evident.

I'm still peeing myself. For punctuation nerds who are absolutely disgusted with the current state of English literary skills. This is a masterfully written, much appreciated break from my typical geekish read.

I love historical accounts that spend entire chapters discussing PDP-10s and 11s. This book is all that and more, detailing the life one of the most eccentric and intelligent figures in the world of software. I've also read the following similar accounts, all of which I would highly recommend: The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Rebel Code, Just for Fun, The Art of UNIX Programming. Note: This book is available online for free... right here.

Game Physics
by David H. Eberly

This book is unfortunately primarily a refresher course in high school physics, perhaps university level, but there are a couple sections which make this one a keeper. I'd recommend it for reference, not something with which you'd want to curl up in front of the fireplace.

Written by a couple of my fellow Microsofties, this book details the threat modeling process in great detail. It's definitely a process book, and as such makes a few assumptions I would prefer to steer away from (e.g. lack of quantitative data showing why the investment in threat modeling is a Good Thing(tm)). That said, there is a lot of good material here.

Decent book thus far (I'm only a couple chapters in), although it feels dated. If I make it through, I'll post a detailed review about it.

ANSI Common Lisp
by Paul Graham

This is a re-read. Unfortunately I'm not able to work with Lisp as often as I'd like, and thus every once in a while I dust off the cobwebs. Each time I go back, I learn something new and am treated to a new perspective on everyday challenges. I want to get ahold and paw through a copy of Guy Steele's Common LISP: The Language, but as of yet have not had a chance.