Book Report Assignment: Book List 
Last modified: July 1, 2002 


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. 

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). 

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. 

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). 

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). 

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

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. 

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


You will find other possibilities in the "Books and Articles" sections at 
the ends of the chapters in _A Gift of Fire_.