Leonard's IM Blog

Recommended Reading List

In an effort to begin building a recommended reading list. Works that I've found to be accessible, inspiring, useful, etc. This list will be expanding as time goes on. Feel free to add a comment w/ your recommendations

Big picture:

• In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999) - an essay by Neal Stephenson on Operating Systems, Interfaces, and Culture
• The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (1991) - Hakim Bey's (pseud. Peter Lamborn Wilson) most famous work, a manifesto describing the creation political and most relevant, ontological spaces that evade formal structures of control
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1997-) - a set of books and essays about hacking culture and open-source development by ESR. These are by and large well thought out, and quite interesting. See also: Philosophy of the GNU Project
• The Art of Unix Programming (2003) - ESR's newest book about Unix philosophy. Very good distillation of one way of approaching development and design.

  Those who fail to learn from Unix are doomed to repeat it

  See also: Worse is Better

• The Virtual Community (1994, 2000) - classic work describing virtual community
• Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (1998-) - 2nd edition book on creating applications and communities online; very influential

// Theory // Practice // Programming Fundamentals Structure and Interpretation of Computer Program // Basic Hardware // Signals // 3D Fundamentals // Networks // Graphics Programming // Motion Graphics, Animation // Platforms // Web / Internet HTML, Addressing, other W3C stuff http://philip.greenspun.com/internet-application-workbook/ // Flash // Binaries // Mobile // Installations // favorite authors: shirky, rushkoff, jenkins // keeping up: ctheory, rhizome, first monday, technology source, technology review, communications, ntk, tr, tnl, other blogs? Posted by leonard at October 24, 2003 09:05 PM