Book Report Assignment: Book List
                      
		      January 2003 version of Sara Baase
		      modified January 2004 by Robert sloan




Robert M. Anderson, Robert Perrucci, Dan E. Schendel, and Leon E.
Trachtman, Divided Loyalties: Whistle-Blowing at BART (Purdue
University, 1980).  
This book describes the efforts of several engineers to get
computer-related safety problems fixed during the construction of the
San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit System.

Frederick Bennett, Computers As Tutors: Solving the Crisis in Education
(Faben, 1999).  
Proposals for productive ways to use computers in education (a controversial 
topic).

Sven Birkerts, The Guttenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in An Electronic
Age (Faber and Faber, 1994).
Birkerts is a critic of computers; he writes his books on a typewriter.

Anne Wells Branscomb, Who Owns Information? (Basic Books, 1994).

Frances Cairncross, The Death of Distance: How the Communications
Revolution Is Changing Our Lives (Harvard Business School Press,
2001).

Dorothy Denning and Peter Denning, Internet Besieged: Countering Cyberspace
Scofflaws (ACM Press, Addison-Wesley, 1998)

Peter J. Denning, ed., The Invisible Future: The Seamless Integration of 
Technology Into Everyday Life (McGraw Hill, 2001).

Peter Denning, Talking Back to the Machine: Computers and Human Aspiration
(Copernicus Books, 1999.

Peter Denning and Robert Metcalfe, Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty
Years of Computing (Copernicus, 1997).  

Michael Dertouzos, What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will
Change Our Lives (HarperEdge, 1997)

Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau, Privacy on the Line: The Politics of 
Wiretapping and Encryption (MIT Press, 1998). 

James A. Dorn, ed., The Future of Money in the Information Age 
(Cato Institute, 1997).

Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason
(MIT Press, 1992).
A report on this book should include some discussion about how well Dreyfus's
arguments have held up over the past decade.  (Can computers now do some
of the things he said they could not do?)

David H. Flaherty, Protecting Privacy in Surveillance Societies
(Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989).

Samuel C. Florman, Blaming Technology: The Irrational Search for Scapegoats, 
(St. Martin's Press, 1981).
A report on this book should include some discussion of how his ideas
relate to computer issues.

Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (Viking Press, 1995).
Gates made some predictions in this book.  How accurate have they been?

Neil Gershenfeld, When Things Start to Think (Owl Books, 1999).

Mike Godwin, Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age
(Times Books, 1998).

Lance J. Hoffman, ed., Building In Big Brother: The Cryptographic 
Policy Debate (Springer Verlag, 1995).

Peter Huber, Law and Disorder in Cyberspace (Oxford Univ. Press, 1997).  
Criticizes FCC regulation of telecommunications, showing examples where
regulations have delayed introduction of new technologies.

Merritt Ierley, Wondrous Contrivances: Technology at the Threshold
(Clarkson Potter, 2002).  Looks at expectations for and attitudes about
many earlier technological devices.

Joel Kotkin, The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution Is Reshaping 
the American Landscape (Random House, 2000).

Thomas K. Landauer, The Trouble With Computers: Usefulness, Usability,
and Productivity (MIT Press, 1995).

Michael Lewis, The New New thing (Norton 2000).
A biography of Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape,
but really reporting on the whole high tech boom through this lens.

Steven Levy, Crypto: When the Code Rebels Beat the Government---Saving
Privacy in the Digital Age (Viking, 2001).

Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Doubleday, 1984).

Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis, Winners, Losers, and Microsoft
(Independent Institute, 1999).

Jessica Littman, Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property
on the Internet (Prometheus Books, 2001).

Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and
the Survival of the Indian Nations (Sierra Club Books, 1991).
Mander is a strong critic of technology.
Read at least Parts 1 and 2.  Parts 3 and 4 are interesting but not
much related to this course.

Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in
Computing (The MIT Press, 2002).
Carnegie Mellon University's investigation of why only 20-25% of
B.S. degrees in computer science go to women, and how to change this.

Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy,
(Princeton University Press, 2002).

Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic
Progress (Oxford University Press, 1990).

Glyn Moody, Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution
(Perseus, 2001).

Alan Murray, The Wealth of Choices (Crown Business, 2000).
Basically a personal finance book, written right at the height of the
boom, when the NASDAQ was around 5,000, about how the Web and the New
Economy change everything.  How does it look now that the NASDAQ has
been below 2,500 for many, many moons?

John Naisbitt, Global Paradox: The Bigger the World Economy, the
More Powerful Its Smallest Players (William Morrow and Company, 1994).

Peter Neumann, Computer-Related Risks (Addison Wesley, 1995).
Neumann is the founder and moderator of the comp.risks forum on Usenet.

Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, The
Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the
Solution (MIT Press, 1998).

Donald Norman, Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the
Age of the Machine (Addison Wesley, 1993).

Andrew Oram et al., Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive
Technologies (O'Reilly, 2001).

George Orwell, 1984.
Orwell's distopian novel in which the totalitarian government controlled 
the people via ubiquitous telescreens.  (Orwell introduced the term 
"Big Brother" for the government.)  Tell how realistic Orwell's view of 
the future turned out to be.  What did he foresee accurately, and what 
did he miss?

Ivars Peterson, Fatal Defect: Chasing Killer Computer Bugs (Times Books,
Random House, 1995).

Henry Petroski, To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful
Design (St. Martin's Press, 1985).
This book is more about engineering in general, not computer systems
design, but the principles and lessons carry over.  In your report, tell
how the book is relevant to computer systems.

Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).  
Another critic of technology.

Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over
Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress (Free Press, 1998).

Douglas S. Robertson, The New Renaissance: Computers and the Next Level of
Civilization (Oxford Univ. Press, 1998).

Gene Rochlin, Trapped in the Net: The Unanticipated Consequences of
Computerization (Princeton Univ. Press, 1997). 

Jeffrey Rosen, The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in
America (Random House, 2000)

Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their
War Against the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age
(Addison Wesley, 1995).  
A vehement critic of computers.  You can skim the first part of the book, 
about the original Luddites.

Douglas Schuler, New Community Networks: Wired for Change (Addison-Wesley, 
1996).

Scott Shane, Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union
(I. R. Dee, 1994).

Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom (Harvard University Press, 1983).
About communications technologies and government policy.  Although it's a
little old, this book has a lot of relevance to issues about the Internet.

Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic
Frontier (Bantam Books, 1992).

Clifford Stoll, The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of
Computer Espionage (Doubleday, 1989).

Clifford Stoll, Siobhan Adcock, ed., High Tech Heretic: Reflections 
of a Computer Contrarian (Anchor Books, 2000).
A book-length argument that one of the worst possible things to do to
elementary schools is equip them with computers for the children to
use!  (And the author is a serious techie!)

Charles Sykes, The End of Privacy (St. Martin's Press, 1999)

Adam Thierer and Wayne Crews, eds., Copy Fights: The Future of
Intellectual Property in the Information Age (Cato Institute, 2002)

Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just for Fun: The Story of an
Accidental Revolutionary (HarperBusiness, 2001).

Eugene Volokh, Freedom of Speech in Cyberspace from the Listener's
Perspective: Private Speech Restrictions, Libel, State Action,
Harassment, and Sex (Univ. of Chicago Legal Forum, 1996).
You may have to get this from a law library.

M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the
   Revolution That Made Computing Personal (Viking, 2001).
A history of how the Internet and the p.c. came to be, that says much
of the cause was one program officer (person who gives out grant
money) with deep vision.

William Wresch, Disconnected: Haves and Have-Nots in the Information Age
(Rutgers Univ. Press, 1996)