Big Ideas From The Computer Age
by Paul Graham
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Co-founder of Twitter and Medium
American writer, educator, and entrepreneur in the field of consumer psychology and behavioral design (1980-)
Recommended by 7 notable people, including Derek Sivers and Ryan Holiday
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See customer reviews on Amazon →Paul Graham collects opinionated, conversational essays about programming, design, and startups, written from a coder-founder viewpoint. Many passages turn a programmer's job into a creative pursuit, with pithy metaphors and candid stories that make abstract ideas feel concrete. Best value: quick, provocative reframes that nudge how you think about building software and starting companies. Main limitation: essays vary in depth and repeat themes; long digressions sometimes read like personal manifesto rather than practical guidance. Treat it as idea-sparking reading, not an instruction manual.
This summary and audience guidance are AI-generated from the book's description and its recommendation history, last updated May 2026. Recommendations, quotes and sources elsewhere on this page come from published material and are not generated.
"The computer world is like an intellectual Wild West, in which you can shoot anyone you wish with your ideas, if you're willing to risk the consequences. " from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul GrahamWe are living in the computer age, in a world increasingly designed and engineered by computer programmers and software...
Difficulty:hard
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View available editions on AmazonWhy recommended
Recommended by 13 sources and appears in Books Recommended by Ryan Holiday, Books Recommended by Investors, and Most Recommended Books.
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Consider Accidental Presidents by Jared Cohen. Recommended by 10 sources.
“Accidental Presidents offers eight narrative portraits of men who succeeded to the U.S. presidency without election, using anecdote-rich scenes and readable context to show how personality and circumstance interact with office power. It’s strongest as a set of self-contained stories that make succession stakes concrete for non-specialist readers; it does not prioritize dense archival argument or exhaustive methodology, so expect some interpretive generalizations and repeated themes across cases. Use it for fast historical orientation rather than scholarly deep-dives.”
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.
