Category Archives: Books

The Innovators. How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Title: The Innovators. How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
Author: Walter Isaacson
Publisher: DEBATE
ISBN: 9788499924663
Review: After his wonderful biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson tells in The Innovators the story of the people who invented the Computer and the Internet, it is a book bound to become the definite history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to understand all the process of innovation and who were its creators. It is the story of how their brains worked and why were they so creative, but it is also the story of how their capability to cooperate and to master the art of work together made them even more creative. In the era which promotes innovation, creativity and teamwork, The Innovators reflects how that happen.

From the Abacus to the Digital Revolution

Title: From the Abacus to the Digital Revolution
Author: Vicenç Torra
Publisher: RBA LIBROS
ISBN: 9788498679908
Review: Throughout its own development, calculation tools were always the result of culture specific numbering systems and available technologies at the time. From prehistorical calculation to Roman abacus, and from Arabian algorithms to the very first calculator, history of calculation is also, to a large extent, history of numbering systems. At the end of this evolutionary process, we find computers and informatics, which were developed with the same purpose: to achieve computer tools more and more powerful in order to perform more complex calculations. Through history the evolution of calculation tools leads us from Babylon to Alexandria, from Rome to China, from Egypt to India, and over the centuries we find Ramón Llull, Charles Babbage, Turing and his Colossus…until the current computer which is already part of our daily environment.

The Thilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

Author: James Gleick
Publisher: Editorial UOC
ISBN: 9788491163374
Review: The most dynamic duo in Victorian London: Charles Babbage, the accidental inventor of the computer and his colleague Ada, countess of Lovelace, a peculiar proto-programmer and daughter of Lord Byron. When Lovelace transcribed Babbage’s construction plans for a huge analytical engine machine back in 1842, she added notes three times longer than the original text. Their notes contain the first appearance of the general theory of computing, one hundred years before the real first computer was built. Sadly, Lovelace died of cancer ten years later after her work was published, and Babbage’s machines were never built.

Ada’s Algorithm

Title: Ada’s Algorithm: How Lord Byron’s Daughter Ada Lovelace Launched the Digital Age
Author: James Essinger
Publisher: ALBA TRAYECTOS
ISBN: 97884-90651384
Review: 150 years after Ada’s Lovelace death, a well-known computer program was named Ada, after the one and only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron. Her crucial, but often forgotten, contribution was acknowledge in first place by mathematicians such as Alan Turing. Nowadays her work is considered groundbreaking in the digital age. Her mother, Annabella Milbanke, abandoned her husband in 1816. In her determination of moving her daughter away from ‘Byron craziness’, Ada received a really strict education focused on Mathematics in order to avoid giving free rein to his imagination. However, the young girl was already thinking about the flying machine at thirteen. At nineteen Ada knew Charles Babbage, designer of The Analytical Engine (a really sophisticate calculator), and she saw the endless possibilities of this new discovery. Her contribution was vital, in fact, as long as she was the one who distinguished between data and processing, an essential knowledge in computer science. James Essinger narrates in a detailed and entertaining manner the circumstances and development of this unusual talent flourishing in the middle of the parental fears of her stubborn mother and the legacy of her fiery father. An intimate portrait of the short but remarkable life of Ada Lovelace framed in the context of London high-class society in the nineteenth century.