I like the anecdotes and interesting lives of 20th century mathematicians/computer scientist, suggest me please your favourite history book about them.
Turing's cathedral, on the invention and development of the earliest digital computers just before, during, and after WWII. Lots of excellent detail, descriptions of the personalities and relationships of many interesting people, like von Neumann.
The Maniac, by Benjamin Labatut. It’s a fictionalised biography of John von Nuemann and the birth of artificial intelligence. Amazing , surreal and unique
Richard Hamming's "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn" is an insider's (Manhattan Project, Bell Labs) view of how computer science as we know it developed.
Also Douglas Coupland's 'Microserfs', described as "Here's a guy who seems to have spent a week with engineers and effortlessly absorbed everything that is important about engineering culture, everything that matters about working at a big company, and everything that matters about working at a startup." https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2748.Microserfs
Might sound silly but I LOVE: Stephen Biesty's Incredible Cross-Sections.
They single handedly made me interested in how things were made, how things were on the inside. How things were engineered.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 5.6 ms ] threadAlso Douglas Coupland's 'Microserfs', described as "Here's a guy who seems to have spent a week with engineers and effortlessly absorbed everything that is important about engineering culture, everything that matters about working at a big company, and everything that matters about working at a startup." https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2748.Microserfs
Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Weiner, the Father of Cybernetics by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman (2005)
Weiner himself wrote some autobiographies, including Child Prodigy and I Am A Mathematician.