Best tech books

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
 
This is an odd cocktail of a book made up of three ingredients, shaken or stirred together with varying success. 
 
First, there’s the science: beautifully written, poetic but rigorous explanations of how trees grow and reproduce: like Biology A level taught by Seamus…

Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything by Stephen Baker

It’s more than five years since a computer called Watson beat two quiz champs on Jeopardy, the American TV game…

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford
 
 People who are interested in the future of technology tend to believe that its impact on jobs and the economy is, and will be, largely benign. 
 
 OK, people in…

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly
 
Kelly is a distinguished tech journalist (former executive editor of Wired magazine) and knows everyone who’s ever been anyone in Silicon Valley. Like all the best techies of a…

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy
 
Levy is one of the best informed and best connected journalists writing about tech companies, and this book is the result of more than two hundred interviews with Google staff past and present and his…

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier
 
Thoroughly original critique of conventional wisdom about web 2.0 trends: Lanier complains that the idea of a person is degraded by the techonology deployed on social networking sites which effectively fragments us into slivers of ‘content’…

The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser
 
 
Eli Pariser’s concept of the filter bubble is a metaphor: he fears we’re increasingly exposed only to information that software has chosen for us in response to how we have behaved online in the past…

How Google Works by Eric Schmidt
 
There’s a pun in the title: it’s about how the company operates, not how Google search is engineered. So you may be a little disappointed if you are expecting techy insights. Instead, this is a slightly preachy but interesting ‘how to’ book…

Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything by Stephen Baker

It’s more than five years since a computer called Watson beat two quiz champs on Jeopardy, the American TV game…

Alibaba’s World: How a Remarkable Chinese Company is Changing the Face of Global Business by Porter Erisman
 
The slogans of most internet tycoons suggest the clean lines and aggressive culture of Silicon Valley: “move fast…

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford
 
People who are interested in the future of technology tend to believe that its impact on jobs and the economy is, and will be, largely benign. 
 
OK, people in…

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson
 
What’s the most important story of our time? Global warming? The industrialisation of China…