With the gift-giving season rapidly approaching, you may be thinking about items for the FOSS lover in your life—or maybe something just for yourself. In this article, we list 10 tech-related books published in 2020 that offer a selection of stories, information, and opinions, covering topics from the scientific to the social.
#HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice
By Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles
The authors examine how marginalized groups use Twitter to advance narratives, counter political spin, and build networks of dissent.
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn
By Richard W. Hamming
Originally published in 1996 and reissued with a new foreword and redrawn graphs and charts, this book explores a timeless theme, namely, that we can learn a highly effective way of thinking that will foster world-changing insights and ideas.
The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
By Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
The authors explore how rapidly accelerating technologies will impact our daily lives and society as a whole.
Home Computers: 100 Icons that Defined a Digital Generation
By Alex Wiltshire and John Short
This book showcases hardware from the early years of the digital revolution, when computing power was contained in a beige box.
If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
By Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore tells the story of how Simulmatics Corporation and its “People Machine” came to influence the methods and models of modern Silicon Valley.
The Kollected Kode Vicious
By George V. Neville-Neil
Kode Vicious (aka George V. Neville-Neil), whose work regularly appears in ACM’s Queue and Communications of the ACM, provides insight and advice for everyone who codes, works with code, or works with coders.
The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread—And Why They Stop
By Adam Kucharski
Epidemiologist Adam Kucharski explores topics such as online manipulation and disease outbreaks to highlight the science of contagion and how it affects daily life.
Uncanny Valley
By Anna Wiener
Anna Wiener’s memoir offers a personal account of aspiration, ambivalence, and disillusionment in Silicon Valley.
A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
By Daniel Susskind
Oxford economist Daniel Susskind explains how technological breakthroughs put all sorts of jobs at risk and examines what we should do about it.
Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
By Nadia Eghbal
Nadia Eghbal looks at the evolution and ramifications of modern open source software development.
If you find a title that suits your fancy, in the spirit of open source and community, we encourage you to support your local bookshop, either online or in person. And, let us know which books you would add to the list.
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