Steven Levy's Top 10 Technology Titles

You may know Steven Levy for his many books--his most recent is The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness--or from his work covering technology for various magazines. He made the move to writing full time for Wired after 12 years at Newsweek just this year (I linked to his recent review of Anathem last week). A true expert on the matter, he recently published his list of the top 10 general-interest technology books over at ieee spectrum online, writing:

Any great nonfiction book combines education with entertainment. In drafting my A-list of general-interest books about technology, I considered impact and significance but gave still more weight to the reading experience. This is a collection where lay readers can appreciate each entry--and engineers, programmers, and other tech professionals can't afford to miss a single one.

His choices are:

• The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance
• Mirror Worlds: Or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean
• A New Kind of Science
• Godel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
• Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
• The Design of Everyday Things
• The Soul of a New Machine
• The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet
• Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb You can find the original article, with detailed reviews of every book on the list, here. Have a great Labor Day everyone!