George Gilder, technopundit and Forbes ASAP writer, envisions a future in which bandwidth is free.
Antennas, by John D. Kraus. "A detailed and compendious text on the key technology for the new wireless revolution that will take the Net to the ether and dissolve wires as a symbol of networking. As in, Negroponte is Wired, but Gilder is an airhead."
Show-stopper! by G. Pascal Zachary. "This is a compelling tale of the creation of Windows NT, which is rapidly becoming the new Unix. It might have been the next The Soul of a New Machine if Zachary had included fewer than 5,000 crucial characters. We can learn from this near miss: do not include the entire menagerie of bugs and debuggers, builders and microserfs, their wives and boyfriends. Show-stopper! is still good, but the new Soul is yet to be written."
James Gleick recently sold The Pipeline, the online service he founded, and is writing again, this time on the social history of the telephone.
"I've been reading three horrifyingly nasty new novels by Englishmen - all filled with the crudeness, the ugliness, the stop-at-nothing roll-around- in-shit indecency that now supplement dry wit and drollery in the British comedic palette. There's nothing digital about them, I'm afraid - these are just plain old books. They are all extremely funny.
"My Idea of Fun, by Will Self, tells a macabre devil-worshipping story (not my usual cup of tea) in the context of (why not?) modern marketing science. The Hippopotamus, by Stephen Fry, begins with a portrait of such a loathsome and loathing old fiend that you'd never imagine the book would finish up as a charmingly moral coming-of-age story.
"I take it that Self and Fry are the latest in a long line of naughty young Englishmen; one of their distinguished predecessors is Martin Amis, whose new novel, The Information, is certainly the best and biggest book I've read in a long time. Amis is the writer you must read now: all the range and power and linguistic gamesmanship of Bellow and Updike with that nasty British edge besides. I was prepared for a novel of literary envy and midlife despair; I was delighted to find a novel also, sweetly, about fatherhood."
Jude Milhon, a k a St. Jude, has been messing around with code since 1967 and is a head honcho at Mondo 2000.
"The Language of Genes, by Steve Jones, is a wonderfully intelligent book that follows intellectual pathways opened up by straight genetical exposition. The style is relaxed and witty, with information presented lucidly in meticulous detail. Language will make you smarter."
Prisoner's Dilemma, by Richard Powers. "This is a blockbuster book that nobody ever read. Cryptographic techniques brought to bear on the human genetic code, a series of wonderful interlocking intellectual caracoles, and heroic female librarians are convincingly woven together in the kind of eternal gold braid that Douglas Hofstadter created in G�del, Escher, Bach."
Loving Little Egypt, by Thomas A. McMahon. "This is an amazing novel about blind phone phreakers at the turn of the century. Nikola Tesla appears, as well as Emma Goldman. Like all of McMahon's books, it's unthinkably strange ... a nerd's delight."
STREET CRED
Engaging GageCream of Beats
README On the bookshelves of the digerati
