Suggested Reading: The Complete Manual of Typography

James Felici — The Complete Manual of Typography: A guide to setting perfect type — Adobe Press, 361 pp. ISBN 978-0-321-12730-3

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With this very well written book, Felici introduces the main concepts of computer assisted typography—the only one that still exists. A large part of the book is devoted to the technological aspects of typesettings, such as software and font formats like TrueType or OpenType, but the most interesting part presents the language of typefaces (and not fonts, there’s a fundamental difference) and how a careful use of typeface makes a text not only beautiful but easy to read.

This is book is for typography what the Gang of Four‘s Design Pattern is to computer engineering. Many things you will read realizing that you knew that already, maybe if only intuitively, but now you have an extended vocabulary to designate very limited and precise concepts.

Suggested Reading: Infotopia: How many minds produce Knowledge

Cass R. Sunstein — Infotopia: How Many Minds produce Knowledge — Oxford University Press, 2006, 273 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-534067-9

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In this short book, Cass Sunstein explains how collaborative and deliberation processes affects the propagation and the use of information (especially in reaching a decision) in a group.

Suggested Reading: A Field Guide To Genetic Programming

Riccardo Poli, William B. Langdon, Nicholas F. McPhee — A Field Guide to Genetic Programming — Lulu, 2008, 240 pp. ISBN 978-1-4092-0073-4

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This is not an ordinary textbook as it does not follow the expected pattern but is rather an extensive survey of the field of genetic programming. Each chapter introduces a major concept or issue in genetic programming and covers the subject in a rather authoritative way, supported by copious documentation—the last 57 pages of the books are occupied by the bibliography.

Suggested Reading: The Trouble With Physics

Lee Smolin — The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next — Mariner Books, 2006, 392 pp. ISBN 978-0-618-91868-3

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In this book, the physicist Lee Smolin tries to explains us in what kind of predicament modern physics is today. He starts by enumerating the five great questions that modern physics must answer:

• Unify general relativity and quantum mechanics; that is, formulate the theory of quantum gravity
• Solve a number of problems within quantum mechanics
• Unify forces, that is, explain all of them within a coherent theory
• Explain the numerous natural constants, that is, explain why they have their specific values and not some other
• Explain weird cosmological phenomena such as “dark matter” and “dark energy”

Suggested Reading: The Race for a New Game Machine

David Shippy, Mickie Phipps — The Race for a New Game Machine — Citadel Press, 2009, 256 pp. ISBN 978-080653101-4

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This book, strongly reminescent of Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer-winning Soul of a New Machine, relates the history of the development of the Cell, Xenon, and Broadway processors, the hearts of Sony’s PS3, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, and Nintendo’s Wii game machines, respectively.

Suggested Readings: Short-Cut Math

Gerard W. Kelly — Short-Cut Math — Dover, 1984, 112 pp. ISBN 978-0-486-24611-6

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This little book—not even 120 pages—will help you sharpen your mental math skills using a series of tricks, strategems, and special cases that will get you to the exact result, or at least to an accurate approximation, with greater speed. The book is not exactly mind-shattering either; still, it may be useful to learn a few new tricks.

Suggested Reading: The Myths of Innovation

Scott Berkun — The Myths of Innovation — O’Reilly, 2007, 178 pp. ISBN 978-0-596-52705-1

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In this book, Berkun debunks the myths surrounding the new, the innovation, the invention that will change the world, surrounding the inventor, lonely and strange, superman or genius. In ten chapters, he systematically demolishes a series of myths, starting by the myth of epiphany, that is, how an innovation is “revealed” to its inventor. He explains how and why such epiphanies do not exist, and, if they exist, how they cannot be anything but the final step of long, tedious work.

Suggested Reading: Beginning Portable Shell Scripting

Peter Seebach — Beginning Portable Shell Scripting — Apress, 2008, 352 pp. ISBN 978-1-4302-1043-6

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This book, like Bash Cookbook: Solutions and Examples for Bash Users isn’t overly technical. It focuses on one particular aspect of shell scripting, portability. While no one really expects a bash script to be excuted using a different shell, such as zsh, for example, Seebach shows us that there are ways to ensure that the scripts behave reasonnably well when executed in different environments and by different shells. Seebach presents various shell constructs and discusses their portability, giving numerous examples.

Suggested Reading: The Design Of Everyday Things

Donald A. Norman — The Design Of Everyday Things — Basic Books, 2002, 257 pp. ISBN 0-465-06710-7

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In the same lineage than Machine Beauty, this books explores the fundamental rules of good design. Built around the following seven precepts, Norman lays out the problems (and solutions) to good design:

• Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head
• Simplify the structure of tasks
• Make things visible: offer feedbacks for actions
• Get the mappings right
• Exploit the contraints, both natural and artificial
• Design for error
• When all else fail, standardize

The book is filled with examples of each principle. Fully annotated and with numerous references, this book (although a bit aged) will serve as a good introduction to the subject, especially for people interested in the design of user interfaces (while, however, the books is not very concerned about computers as the original edition was written in the late 80s).

To read with Machine Beauty, User Interface Design for Programmers, and The Inmates are Running the Asylum.

Suggested Reading: Counterknowledge

Damian Thompson — Counterknowledge: How we surrendered to conspiracy theories, quack medecine, bogus science, and fake history — Viking Canada, 2008, 162 pp. ISBN 978-0-670-06865-4

(buy at Amazon.com)

Reminding me of the Petit cours d’autodéfense intellectuelle,
Counterknowledge deals with various pseudoscience and the strategies employed by their supporters to spread the “counterknowledge”. Everything goes: quack medecine (chakra-aligned neuromagnetic cristals), pseudohistory (apparently the Chinese circumnavigated the globe in 1421), and, my favorite, Creationism.

As you may have guessed, Thompson demolishes the quack theories, but must importantly, he shows how the most basic critical thinking will tear the pseudosciences down.

Do not read if you’re a conspiracy theorist.

Pedlars of counterknowledge often insist that their ideas should be taken seriously because ‘no one has been able to come up with a better explanation’ for whatever mystery they have lighted upon. But this argument only betrays their muddled thinking. The fact that a subject is genuinely puzzling, that there are vast gaps in our understanding of it, does not lower the standard of evidence we require in order to fill the gaps

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