Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

I’m surprised this didn’t get more of a response when I posted it on Mastodon, to be honest. A while ago I was talking about sci-fi books with a colleague. He was amazed I had a copy and practically begged to borrow it. (Unlike Peopleware, I did get it back!)

It is the definitive collection of cyberpunk short-stories. Much of what I wrote about Neuromancer could be written about Mirrorshades [affiliate link], so I won’t repeat myself.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

I lent “Peopleware” [affiliate link] to a friend at some point but never got it back. I supposed they valued it as much as I do. I should probably buy the newer edition at some point.

I’m not sure if this book was the epiphany or it just happened around the same time, but at worst it was a major influence. The epiphany was that the really hard challenges in computer science were not the technical ones but the ones around people. It doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable to work on technical problems or solve them. But the challenges organising and getting people to communicate and work together effectively and build the right thing (rather than the interesting thing that we want to build) are also important, possibly more important.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

“Neuromancer” [affiliate link] probably needs no introduction. I may not reference it as often as Hitchhikers Guide, but if you know anything about me, I doubt you’d be surprised that I include it here.

When I first read it, I’d not used, maybe never even heard of, the Internet. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready to plug my brain into a computer but the idea of a global computer-based hallucination is something we now all experience every day. Maybe not exactly as Gibson wrote. Well, hopefully not.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

Sadly, another one of those “what happened to the author” books. As much as I don’t want to be a gatekeeper, Dawkins might well have been better sticking to evolution rather than branch out into religion and trans issues (the former in which he’s forthright but not original and the latter where he’s just wrong).

But whatever happened since, “The Selfish Gene” [affiliate link] itself is a classic. It’s where the word “meme” came from, and memes are everywhere these days! It’s well written and makes a difficult subject understandable. It refined my thinking about evolution, the scientific process and science writing in general.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

The concept is right there in the title: Serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions. Is it possible to use a machine gun to create a jet pack? How many Lego bricks would it take to build a bridge from London to New York? How high can a human throw things?

In that sense, “What if?” [affiliate link] is another one of those “backwards” choices. The book itself is only ten years old but I think my love of taking absurd questions seriously goes back much further. I do it often when my kids ask silly questions, but Munroe is able to do it with a lot more scientific and mathematical rigour. I love the concept, and it’s executed pretty much perfectly.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

I was an atheist long before the four horsemen arrived on the scene in the mid-2000s. Their writing did clarify my thinking and made me consider aspects that I’d not come across before. Like How to be a Liberal, it also gave me names for concepts that I had previously been aware of.

I probably could have put any of the Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens or Dennett [affiliate links] books in the list, but there’s something about Hitchens takes-no-prisoners writing that pipped the others to the post here. (I found Dennett’s a little disappointing, to be honest. Probably a good thing I never did philosophy at university.)

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

Sometimes confused with the also excellent Programming Pearls, Programming Perl [affiliate link] is quite different. It’s big and well written and well structured. But a lot of books meet those criteria, so in what sense did it have an impact on me?

It’s a technical book that proves that you don’t need to be dry and boring to get the message across. Being “professional” doesn’t mean being humourless.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

It’s a slow-burner of a book [affiliate link]. Everyone said how great it was. It took me a while to read and I thought it was a bit meh.

But over time its impact seeps in. You notice the rings on your hob, the hints about which way a door opens (often incorrectly), forcing function on ATMs.

After a while you realise you’re noticing these things because you read the book. Maybe it wasn’t so meh after all.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

When I completed this series on Mastodon, I wrote about Pollen. This was a mistake. Not because Pollen is a bad book, but because it’s the followup to Vurt [affiliate link]. It was Vurt that I was thinking of. You should read both of them, but you should start with Vurt.

Unfortunately for me, it’s quite a difficult book to explain. It’s kind of cyberpunk with psychedelics. But the thing that made it stand out to me was the setting. Whereas most other cyberpunk books were set in Japan or China or San Francisco, this was set in grey and drizzly Manchester, in the north of England.

Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.

Like Accidental Empires, this is one of those books that people in the software industry probably should read but mostly don’t. Maybe knowing the history and the characters that got us to our current state may not make a big difference day-to-day, but I think it allows us to appreciate what we have, or at least understand some of the starting conditions.

For instance, we take the idea of free software for granted these days, but it wasn’t always that way. (But maybe rms always was that way. Society turned a blind eye to a lot of questionable behaviour over the years, and the software industry is no different. When you read about the good work he did, you might also want to read up on some of his more recent writings to get a more rounded picture.)