Non-Fiction book reviews

[www.wordle.net]

The non-fiction books that I refer to somewhere on my pages, or have reviewed. I especially recommend to the general reader the emboldened authors and titles; of the rest, some are also recommended, but for specialists only. For each author, I list those books that I've read (and ones that are on my "to be read" pile) [and ones on my "to be bought when I find them" list]. I make no pretense to completeness: there might be other books by the author that I don't intend to buy, or don't know about.


 

latest reviews

 

alphabetical by author

A

Robert P. Abelson • Statistics as Principled Argument
Eric Abrahamson, David H. Freedman • A Perfect Mess
Amir D. Aczel • Entanglement
Christoph Adami • Introduction to Artificial Life
Christopher Alexander • pattern languages
Scott Ambler • Agile Modeling
Robert Axelrod • The Evolution of Co-operation
——, Michael D. Cohen • Harnessing Complexity
Ken Auer, Roy Miller • Extreme Programming Applied

B

[Z in Practice]

André Bacard • The Computer Privacy Handbook
Per Bak • How Nature Works
Philip Ball • The Self-Made Tapestry
Rosalind Barden, Susan Stepney, David Cooper • Z in Practice
Michael Barnsley • Fractals Everywhere
John D. Barrow
Jon Barwise, John Etchemendy • The Liar
——, Lawrence Moss • Vicious Circles
Laurie Bauer, Peter Trudgill, eds • Language Myths
John Bear • Send This Jerk the Bedbug Letter
Kent Beck
Michael Benson • Beyond
Peter J. Bentley • Digital Biology
Kevin Beresford • Roundabouts of Great Britain
Ludwig von Bertalanffy • General System Theory
Ambrose Bierce
Richard J. Bird • Chaos and Life
Susan Blackmore • The Meme Machine
Sandra Blakeslee, Matthew Blakeslee • The Body has a Mind of Its Own
Michael Blastland, Andrew Dilnot • The Tiger that Isn't
Margaret Boden • The Philosophy of Artificial Life
George S. Boolos, Richard C. Jeffrey • Computability and Logic
Valentino Braitenberg • Vehicles
Mark Breier • The Ten Second Internet Manager
David Brin • The Transparent Society
Damien Broderick • The Spike
Rodney A. Brooks • Cambrian Intelligence • Robot
Julian Brown • The Quest for the Quantum Computer
William J. Brown et al • AntiPatterns • AntiPatterns and Patterns in Software Configuration Management
Colin Bruce • Conned Again, Watson!
Bill Bryson • Mother Tongue
Mark Buchanan • Small World • Ubiquity
Armin Bunde, Shlomo Havlin, eds • Fractals in Science
Jeremy Butterfield • Damp Squid
Bill Buxton • Sketching User Experiences

C

George L. Campbell • Concise Compendium of the World's Languages
Cretien van Campen • The Hidden Sense
Sean B. Carroll • Endless Forms Most Beautiful
James P. Carse • Finite and Infinite Games
John L. Casti, Anders Karlqvist • Mission to Abisko
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza • Genes, Peoples and Languages
Gregory Chaitin • The Limits of Mathematics • Meta Math!
John Cheesman, John Daniels • UML Components
Andy Clark • Being There • MindwareNatural-Born Cyborgs
Peter Cochrane • Tips for Time Travellers
Alistair Cockburn • Agile Software Development • Writing Effective Use Cases
Irun R. Cohen • Tending Adam's Garden
Jack Cohen • The Privileged Ape
——, Graham Medley • Stop Working and Start Thinking
——, Ian Stewart • The Collapse of Chaos • Evolving the Alien
Leah Hager Cohen • Train Go Sorry
John H. Conway, Richard Guy • The Book of Numbers
James Coplien, Douglas Schmidt • Pattern Languages of Program Design
Frederick C. Crews • Postmodern Pooh
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Beyond Boredom and Anxiety • Finding Flow
N. J. Cutland • Computability

D

Paul Davies • The Last Three Minutes
Robyn M. Dawes • Everyday Irrationality
Richard Dawkins
Christopher Day • Places of the Soul
Tom DeMarco • The Deadline • Peopleware • Slack
Daniel C. Dennett
David Deutsch • The Fabric of Reality
Keith Devlin • All the Math that's Fit to Print
Dietrich Dörner • The Logic of Failure
K. Eric Drexler • Engines of Creation
Lyn Dupré • Bugs in Writing
Freeman Dyson
George Dyson • Darwin Among the Machines

E

Gerald Edelman • Bright Air, Brilliant Fire
Claus Emmeche • The Garden in the Machine
Joshua M. Epstein, Robert Axtell • Growing Artificial Societies
Bruno Ernst • The Eye Beguiled
Paul Evitts • A UML Pattern Language

F

Richard P. Feynman • Feynman Lectures on Computation • The Meaning of it All
Katrina S. Firlik • Another Day in the Frontal Lobe
Gary William Flake • The Computational Beauty of Nature
Vincent Flanders, Michael Willis • Web Pages that Suck
Ira R. Forman, Scott H. Danforth • Putting Metaclasses to Work
Robert L. Forward • Indistinguishable From Magic
H. W. Fowler • Dictionary of Modern English Usage
Martin Fowler • Analysis Patterns • Refactoring • UML Distilled

G

Jostein Gaarder • Sophie's World
Richard P. Gabriel • Patterns of Software
Erich Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides • Design Patterns
Martin Gardner • Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?
Atul Gawande • Better • Complications
Henry Gee • Deep Time
David Gelernter • The Aesthetics of Computing • The Muse in the Machine
Murray Gell-Mann • The Quark and the Jaguar
Neil Gershenfeld • When Things Start to Think
Peter Giblin • Primes and Programming
Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, et al • Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart
Malcolm Gladwell • Blink • Outliers • The Tipping Point
Robert L. Glass • Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering
James Gleick • Faster
Neal Goldstein, Jeff Alger • Designing Object-oriented Software for the Macintosh
Larry Gonick, Mark Wheelis • The Cartoon Guide to Genetics
Brian Goodwin • How the Leopard Changed Its Spots
Deborah M. Gordon • Ants at Work
Stephen Jay Gould • Questioning the Millennium
Ernest Gowers • The Complete Plain Words
Temple Grandin • Thinking in Pictures
——, Catherine Johnson • Animals in Translation
Tino Gramss et al., eds • Non-Standard Computation
Jeremy J. Gray • The Hilbert Challenge
Brian Greene • The Elegant Universe • The Fabric of the Cosmos
Alan H. Guth • The Inflationary Universe

H

J. Storrs Hall • Nanofuture
G. H. Hardy, E. M. Wright • An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers
David Harel
Franklin M. Harold • The Way of the Cell
Betty Lehan Harragan • Games Mother Never Taught You
Robert L. Harris • Information Graphics
Julian Havil • Nonplussed!
Mark Haw • Middle World
Stefan Helmreich • Silicon Second Nature
Ray Hemmings, Dick Tahta. Images of Infinity
Dee Hock • Birth of the Chaordic Age
Paul Hoffman • The Man Who Loved Only Numbers
Douglas R. Hofstadter
John H. Holland • Hidden Order
Martin Hollis • Trust Within Reason
Jim Holmes • Object-oriented Compiler Construction
Andrew Hunt, David Thomas • The Pragmatic Programmer
Michael Huth, Mark Ryan • Logic in Computer Science

J

Michael Jackson • Software Requirements and Specifications
Java-SIG • 100 Best Applets
Ron Jeffries, Ann Anderson, Chet Hendrickson • Extreme Programming Installed
Bill Jensen • Work 2.0
Henrik Jeldtoft Jensen • Self-Organized Criticality
Jeff Johnson • GUI Bloopers
Steven Johnson • Emergence • Everything Bad is Good for You
Robert L. Jolles • The Way of the Road Warrior
Richard Jones • Soft Machines

K

Michio Kaku • Hyperspace
Edward Kasner, James Newman • Mathematics and the Imagination
Stuart Kauffman • At Home in the Universe • Investigations
Evelyn Fox Keller• Making Sense of Life
Stephen H. Kellert • In the Wake of Chaos
Joshua Kerievsky • Refactoring to Patterns
Kevin Kelly • New Rules for the New Economy • Out of Control
Stan Kelly-Bootle
J. A. Scott Kelso • Dynamic Patterns
James Kennedy, Russell C. Eberhart • Swarm Intelligence
Scott Kim • Inversions
Nancy Kline • Time to Think
Jeffrey Kluger • Simplexity
Donald Knuth • computing, typesetting
Leonard Koren • Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers
Bart Kosko • Fuzzy Thinking
E. Kranakis • Primality and Cryptography
Philippe Kruchten • The Rational Unified Process: an introduction
Steve Krug • Don't Make Me Think

L

George Lakoff • Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things
——, Mark Johnson • Metaphors We Live By
——, Rafael Núñez • Where Mathematics Comes From
——, Mark Turner • More than Cool Reason
Robert Laughlin • A Different Universe
Shaughan Lavine • Understanding the Infinite
Douglas B. Lenat, R. V. Guha • Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems
Janna Levin • How the Universe Got Its Spots
Roger Lewin, Birute Regine • Weaving Complexity and Business
Alan Lewis • Pundemoniam!
Steven Levy
David Lindley • Where Does the Weirdness Go?
Seth Lloyd • Programming the Universe
A. R. Luria • The Mind of a Mnemonist

M

[ORCA]

Roy MacLean, Susan Stepney, et al • Analysing Systems
Stewart Mader • Wikipatterns
William Majeski • The Lie Detection Book
Benoit B. Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson • The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets
Jim and Michele McCarthy • Software for Your Head
Wil McCarthy • Hacking Matter
Pete McBreen • Questioning Extreme Programming • Software Craftsmanship
Gary McGraw, Edward W. Felten • Java Security: Hostile Applets, Holes, and Antidotes
Michael D. McMaster • The Intelligence Advantage
John McWhorter • The Power of Babel
Bertrand Meyer
Mary Midgley • Utopias, Dolphins and Computers
Peter Millican, Andy Clark • Machines and Thought
Marvin Minsky • The Emotion Machine • The Society of Mind
Melanie Mitchell • Analogy-Making as Perception
Leonard Mlodinow • Some Time with Feynman
Mark Monmonier • How to Lie with Maps
Hans Moravec • Mind ChildrenRobot
Harold J. Morowitz • The Emergence of Everything
Richard Morris • Artificial Worlds
Haruki Murakami • What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

N

National Geographic • Satellite Atlas of the World
Nicholas Negroponte • Being Digital
Mamadou Niang • Pulaar Dictionary
Patrick Niemeyer, Joshua Peck • Exploring Java
Denis Noble • The Music of Life
Donald A. Norman
Wendy Northcutt • The Darwin Awards

O

Michael O'Neill, Conor Ryan • Grammatical Evolution
Onora O'Neill • A Question of Trust
Paul Ormerod • Butterfly Economics • Why Most Things Fail

P

John Allen Paulos • Once Upon a Number
Heinz-Otto Peitgen, Hartmut Jürgens, Dietmar Saupe • Fractals for the Classroom
David Perkins • The Eureka Effect
Tom Peters • The Circle of Innovation
Ivars Peterson • Newton's Clock
Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini • Inevitable Illusions
Rosalind W. Picard • Affective Computing
Clifford Pickover • Computers and the Imagination
Steven Pinker • Words and Rules • The Stuff of Thought
Jonathan Pletzke • Advanced Smalltalk
Gavin Pretor-Pinney • A Pig with Six Legs
Geoffrey Pullum • The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax

Q

Michael Quinion • Port Out, Starboard Home

R

V. S. Ramachandran, Sandra Blakeslee • Phantoms in the Brain
Eric Raymond • The Cathedral and the Bazaar • The New Hacker's Dictionary
Martin Rees • Just Six Numbers
Byron Reeves, Clifford Nass • The Media Equation
Ed Regis • What Is Life?
Matt Ridley • Genome • The Red Queen
Mark Ronan • Symmetry and the Monster
Rudy Rucker • Artificial Life Lab
Julie Rugg, Lynda Murphy • A Book Addict's Treasury

S


 

[High Integrity Compilation]

[OOZ]

Karl Sabbagh • Dr. Riemann's Zeros
Oliver Sacks
Carl Sagan • The Demon-Haunted World
Marcus du Sautoy • The Music of the Primes
Susan Schaller • A Man without Words
Al Seckel • Masters of Deception
Keith Selkirk, William Wynne Willson • Fifty per cent Proof
Ricardo Semler • Maverick!
Richard Sennett • The Craftsman
Yen-Ping Shan, Ralph E. Earle • Enterprise Computing with Objects
David Shenk • Data Smog
B. Shriver, P. Wegner • Research Directions in Object-Oriented Programming
Neil Shubin • Your Inner Fish
Tom Siegfried • The Bit and the Pendulum
Simon Singh • Fermat's Last Theorem
Suzanne Skublics, E. J. Klimas, D. A. Thomas • Smalltalk with Style
N. J. A. Sloane, Simon Plouffe • The Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
Neil Smith, Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli • The Mind of a Savant
Lee Smolin • The Life of the Cosmos • Three Roads to Quantum Gravity
Ricard Solé, Brian Goodwin • Signs of Life
Ian Sommerville, Pete Sawyer • Requirements Engineering
Robert Solomon, Fernando Flores • Building Trust
Joel Spolsky • Joel on Software • Smart and Gets Things Done
Hugo Steinhaus
Susan Stepney • High Integrity Compilation
——, Rosalind Barden, David Cooper • Object Orientation in Z
Ian Stewart • Nature's Numbers
——, Jack Cohen • Figments of Reality
J. Michael Straczynski • The Complete Book of Scriptwriting
Steven Strogatz • Sync
Leonard Susskind, James Lindesay • An Introduction to Black Holes, Information and the String Theory Revolution
Michael Swift, George Grant • Britain from the Air

T

Nassim Nicholas Taleb • The Black Swan • Fooled by Randomness
Stephen Todd, William Latham • Evolutionary Art and Computers
Linus Torvalds, David Diamond • Just for Fun
Lynne Truss • Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Edward R. Tufte • graphic and chart design
Sherry Turkle • Life on the Screen

U

The Unicode Consortium • The Unicode Standard, version 2.0

V

Ian Vince, Dan Kieran • The Myway Code
John Vlissides • Pattern Hatching

W

Leonard M. Wapner • The Pea and the Sun
Mark Ward • Virtual Organisms
Peter Wayner • Disappearing Cryptography
Robert Weber • A Random Walk in Science
David Weeks, Jamie James • Eccentrics
Gerald M. Weinberg • An Introduction to General Systems Thinking • The Secrets of Consulting
David Weinberger • Everything is Miscellaneous
David Wells • Curious and Interesting Numbers
Colin P. Williams, Scott H. Clearwater • Ultimate Zero and One
Donna Williams • Nobody Nowhere • Somebody Somewhere
Joseph M. Williams • Style
Garnett P. Williams • Chaos Theory Tamed
Maryanne Wolf • Proust and the Squid

Z

Ricardo S. Zebulum, Pacheco, Vellasco • Evolutionary Electronics
Arnold M. Zwicky et al • Studies Out in Left Field