The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
by Charles Petzold
Recommended by Scott Hanselman
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Amazon availability
Recommended by 1 source and appears in Programming, Technology, and Science.
What do flashlights, the British invasion, black cats, and seesaws have to do with computers In CODE, they show us the ingenious ways we manipulate language and invent new means of communicating with each other. And through CODE, we see how this ingenuity and our very human compulsion to communicate have driven the technological innovations of the...
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Why recommended
Recommended by 1 source and appears in Programming, Technology, and Science.
People and public figures who have recommended this book.
Recommendation proof is sourced from public posts, interviews, reading lists, and cited references.
Scott Hanselman
“The second edition of Petzold's seminal work "Code" is available on Kindle for just $20! This book is glorious and it's now celebrating a second edition with 70 new pages, a companion website, and new custom diagrams #ref”
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Consider The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.. Recommended by 15 sources.
“Reading it feels like listening to Frederick P. Brooks Jr. deliver a set of terse, experience-packed essays drawn from his time managing the IBM System/360 project. The most useful material: concise maxims about staffing, scheduling, documentation, and interface boundaries that give language for hard organizational limitations. Limits include dated technical examples, a single-author, prescriptive voice, and repeated restatements; readers looking for modern case studies or practical templates will find no hands-on exercises. Best read slowly to mine specific heuristics rather than as a how-to playbook.”
Each recommendation is collected from a public source — interviews, articles, or curated lists — and linked to its original URL. Books with many verifiable recommendations from respected people rank higher.
