You could hardly hope for a better choice: her 2000 book, Inventing the Internet, is one of the few on that subject that includes the non-US contributions to the development of computer networking. In this book, Abbate compares and contrasts the experiences of the female pioneers in computing in Britain and America, beginning by considering the experiences of the women working at Bletchley Park and on ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania during the Second World War.

As Abbate tells it, gender discrimination was particularly rampant on the British side, where male managers assumed that women were simply incapable of learning any technical detail. Even without that, the regime of absolute secrecy that for many decades afterwards kept Bletchley Park staff from discussing any of the computer work they were doing meant that they tended to learn very little. On the US side, more swapping of information was allowed, and the women were given more encouragement to learn about the machines. The result, Abbate argues, is that after the war US women who wished to continue in computing careers were in much better shape to do so: they were, unlike their British counterparts, allowed to tell prospective employers what they'd been working on.

Those careers — and the way men gradually took over the computing field as software became more closely identified with engineering and lost some of its social and organisational context — occupy the rest of the book, as Abbate follows the trajectories of women in academia and business through to the present day. Over the last couple of decades, as Abbate notes, the numbers of women in computing have been dropping. By now, they are pretty grim, certainly in academia, and even in the commercial sector. This is despite the presence of a few high-profile female CEOs such as Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!), Meg Whitman (HP, also previously run by Carly Fiorina) and, in the UK, Steve Shirley — who tells Abbate that she built her software business by hiring home-based women programmers.

Over the last couple of decades, Abbate notes, the numbers of women in computing have been dropping.

Both the British Computer Society and the US Association for Computing Machinery have documented and anguished over the "shrinking pipeline", and it's a slight disappointment that Abbate doesn't quite manage to answer why it's happening. There is a hint, when she quotes Shirley, who notes that because the computer industry moves so fast, a break to have a baby is damaging to a woman's career in a way that it's not in other science and engineering disciplines.

The other not-quite-answered question is this: how is the code that women write different? The closest suggestion seems to be that women, who are typically taught "soft" skills such as communication, may be better at serving their customers' actual needs than someone approaching software as a purely technical problem.

Either way, if you're a young woman seeking an interesting career, we've got your role models right here.

Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing
By Janet Abbate
MIT Press
248 pages
ISBN: 978-0-262-01806-7
20.95

The book is built around a mountaineering analogy, with 'PC Peak' — encapsulating the personal computing era and the human-centric internet/web — having been scaled. But looming above is the far larger 'Trillions Mountain', where, the authors contend, "the design techniques that have served us well on PC Peak will be wholly inadequate for the problems of scale we will soon face".

The early chapters summarise the route to the post-PC era, including a cautionary tale about a once-great company (DEC) that failed to adapt to an imminent (PC) revolution and paid the ultimate price within a decade of its peak revenue year. The inference here is clear: there will be some notable fallers in the foothills of Trillions Mountain. The next-generation computing landscape, comprising trillions of nodes, is discussed, with the authors stressing the importance of 'fungible' devices and 'liquid' information — terms borrowed from economics. Fungibility — the free interchange of equivalent goods — is not a widespread feature of today's IT landscape, with its numerous walled gardens, they say. Liquidity — the free flow of value — is variable: low-level packet switching flows efficiently enough, but higher levels of the information infrastructure are stickier. The third key requirement of the trillion-node computing landscape, say the authors, is a 'true cyberspace' comprising persistent digital objects, in contrast to today's hypertext-based web.

In fact, according to Lucas, Ballay and McManus, quite a few components of today's IT landscape are poorly architected for the trillion-node future. This includes computers that are platforms for data-siloing applications rather than pure information, the web browser — even the web itself and cloud computing. What we're heading for, they say, is Complexity Cliff (there's that mountaineering analogy again) — cascading unforeseen failures in ill-designed complex systems that, for example, "could easily 'brick' all the lights in a next-generation skyscraper that uses wireless systems to control illumination. Or the elevators. Or the ventilation".

Around this point in the book, the authors expound their vision of cloud computing, which turns out to be a pervasive information store built on peer-to-peer networking — they call it the GRIS (the Grand Repository In the Sky), and contrast it with today's essentially client-server 'corporate Hindenberg' clouds that could one day, like the airship, explode along with your data. There are also some rather curmudgeonly digs at the software development community in this chapter, which may not meet with universal approval. For example, a perceived lack of organised professionalism in software engineering (compared to codes of practice for the likes of builders or electricians) is largely laid at the door of the open-source community: "the Internet era has now passed into the hands of a pop culture that is neither formally trained nor intellectually rigorous, and doesn't particularly care whether its 'solutions' have a rigorous engineering basis — as long as they accomplish the task at hand".

Turning to the assault on Trillions Mountain, there are plenty of useful insights, beginning with a chapter on nature's solutions to distributed complexity. There are musings on symbiotic mycorrhizal networks in forest trees, Pauli's Exclusion Principle, the Periodic Table, DNA and resilience in biological peer-to-peer networks, leading to a discussion of four underlying principles behind 'good' complexity (as opposed to the chaotic complexity we wish to avoid): hierarchy, modularity, redundancy and generativity (a Chomskyan concept, 'generativity' here refers to the need to design "processes by which people author and tune the digital environment in which they live").

The next chapter covers the birth and development of design as a profession, saluting Buckminster Fuller and other Depression-era pioneers of the discipline along the way (we might expect a hit-tip to the likes of Jonathan Ive and Dieter Rams here, but neither even appear in the index). Around this point in the book, the authors lay their cards on the table, so to speak: "Today, we are arguably on the cusp of a fourth revolution [after the agricultural, industrial and information revolutions]: the age of Trillions...We think that pervasive computing represents a profoundly different relationship of people to information, and that eventually it will be understood as a distinct epoch of human history".

'Trillions' is a rarity among technology books: it's accessible, packed with challenging ideas and nicely designed, with plenty of (sometimes quirky) illustrations and sidebars.

This is where MAYA Design saw its opportunity back in the late 1980s: applying the principles of industrial design to a post-industrial world in which the computer industry "was making no distinction between design and engineering. Indeed, engineers were often the sole designers of computing machines intended to be sold to and used by people who knew nothing about engineering". Their methodology for fostering good post-industrial design involves true interdisciplinary collaboration and a simple precept for cutting through specialist jargon: "draw what you mean" — literally, turn your ideas into diagrams.

Up next is 'design science', an evolving discipline founded on a mixture of natural ecological patterns, professional design practices, traditional science and "a commitment to the search for underlying Architecture to provide structure". Key to the successful practice of design science, say the authors, will be: "Deeply interdisciplinary methods; Focusing on humans; Interaction physics; Information-centric interaction design; and Computation in context". ('Interaction physics', in case you're wondering, is a set of inviolable 'laws' that will help to define a unified user experience.) There are interesting ideas here: for example, the fact that, as information itself takes centre stage in the Internet of Things/trillion-node network, the user experience becomes more of an emergent property than a consequence of the design of individual devices. The chapter ends with a summary of the challenge facing design scientists: "It is one thing to design a usable computer program. It is quite another to design a usable environment when that environment comprises innumerable semiautonomous devices mediating an unbounded swirl of constantly flowing information".

This section of the book ends with a discussion of Architecture (with a capital A) — and in particular 'information architecture', which is defined as the bit sitting between detailed systems architecture and user interface architecture. "If design science is going to be more than pretension," the authors say, "it must develop work products that exhibit the same powers of abstraction and generalization as do the differential equations of the physicist and the periodic table of the chemist." Who will be design science's Newton, or Mendeleev, we wonder?

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The final two chapters attempt to discern what life will be like in the pervasive-computing world of the trillion-node network, without — wisely — being too specific. We are introduced to the concept of an 'information ecology' comprising 'life forms' (devices), 'currency' (information), architectures (information architecture and device architecture) and 'the environment' (human culture). Certain desirable properties emerge from such thinking, including resilience built on widespread redundancy, diversity and the embracing of stochastic processes. Trust, provenance, reputation and security will all be vital on Trillions Mountain — the authors raise the all-too-plausible spectre of "malicious functionality hiding in insignificant hardware" and consider it more of a threat than "malicious code hiding in information objects". Above all, the information ecosystem needs to be 'humane', accommodating online communities ('networks of trust'), privacy and the empowerment of power users (your friendly local/family geek, for example) who can help ordinary mortals survive in the new pervasive digital environment.

Trillions is a rarity among technology books: it's accessible, packed with challenging ideas and nicely designed, with plenty of (sometimes quirky) illustrations and sidebars. You may not agree with all of the authors' assertions or subscribe wholeheartedly to their roadmap for the trillion-node network, and some will hanker for more technical detail, but it's a stimulating and highly recommended read for anyone with a stake in our developing digital future.

Trillions: Thriving in the Emerging Information Ecology
By Peter Lucas, Joe Ballay and Mickey McManus
John Wiley
252 pages
ISBN: 978-1-1181-7607-8
23.99 / €28.00

Look out for much more content on machine-to-machine (M2M) communication and the Internet of Things in January.

It's this middle, rational ground that Tom Chatfield — the author of 2010's Fun, Inc — covers in How to Thrive in the Digital Age. This short (160-page) book, which still manages to pack a lot in, is part of a series called 'School of Life' that claims to offer "radical ways to help us raid the treasure trove of human knowledge". I wouldn't call Chatfield's entry radical in any way, but as a guide to thinking about the internet in 2012, it's a reasonable effort to help people through the decisions they make about their online lives.

Along the way Chatfield tackles some particularly persistent myths. No, pornography is not the most common search term. Yes, sometimes people escape into controlled virtual worlds where they can win if they're persistent enough — but when the world you're escaping from is Manhattan, just post-9/11?

Another of these myths is that young people don't care about privacy. That's not ithe case, according to Chatfield: young people (like young people of former generations) simply aren't interested in what adults have to say about privacy because those adults persist in focusing on the wrong things (like the threat of paedophiles) and lose credibility as a result. For teens, the bigger issues are cyberbullying and the fact that they, like the rest of us, have a hard time navigating privacy settings on social networks. Chatfield suggests that digital history — and debate about current issues — should be incorporated into education. The list of further reading at the back of the book is a good place to start.

Chatfield suggests that digital history — and debate about current issues — should be incorporated into education.

Similarly, rather than simply tear apart Keen's, Carr's and Levine's arguments, Chatfield examines the workings of the internet as a medium in several different cases. On the execution of Troy Davis, for example, he notes that the story did not have the same closure on the Net as it did in traditional media. His bigger point is simply that although the internet's massive disruption is indisputable, the negative vista that Keen, Carr and Levine see is only one aspect of it. Experts also blog, for example, and new models for financing books are appearing. The emerging digital landscape is not a barren wasteland in all directions.

How to Thrive in the Digital Age
By Tom Chatfield
Pan Macmillan
160 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4472-0231-8
£7.99

The mixture of paranoia and rewriting of history — especially questions like whether Harris did or didn't stage an art 'happening' at the pre-9/11 Twin Towers (involving a helicopter and a window replaced with a temporary balcony to dance on), and whether he was or wasn't was followed by spies when he was selling his orchard refuge — leave the reader wondering about the reliability of some of what Smith recounts in the book. Indeed, the author frequently wonders about it himself. That might be appropriate, given the blurring of the lines between life and performance in Quiet and We Live In Public, two art projects reminiscent of both Big Brother and The Truman Show that Harris ran under the Pseudo umbrella — and that ultimately caused his meltdown (along with the failure of Pseudo). If you know the camera is always on, can you avoid playing to it?

Pseudo.com was trying to tap into the urge to record our lives and show them off that has powered Facebook to success, but in a much more frenetic and voyeuristic manner. Like many pre-Facebook sites, it was about the more demanding video and webcasting rather than text and photos (a distinction that escapes the author when he repeatedly praises Pseudo.com for being years ahead of Facebook). When Harris and his girlfriend tried to live on camera for 100 days, the technology didn't always do the expected: motion sensors meant the camera might switch away from someone in the shower because a cat walked in front of a camera, leaving viewers staring at an an empty room…

With an apartment — and a bathroom — wired for broadcasting, Harris called himself "the good side of Big Brother" and planned to "take CBS out of business". Instead, Pseudo.com was the first Silicon Alley company to go bust. Ahead of his time, a fantastic showman dazzling the gullible, a social manipulator with strangely poor social skills or narcissist headed for self-destruction? It's hard to tell, and sometimes hard to care. Although Harris describes his own story as "this is all hearsay but fairly reliable", it sounds by turns shallow, predictable, bizarre, confusing and deeply sad. It seems to have sucked the author into the kind of long, strange trip more usually associated with the counterculture pranksters who show up in the history of Silicon Valley companies — complete with a drug-fuelled Grand Narrative that may or may not turn out to be true in the final chapter.

"Pseudo.com was trying to tap into the urge to record our lives and show them off that has powered Facebook to success, but in a much more frenetic and voyeuristic manner."

New York in the 90s seems just as much of a fantasy, with the ups and downs of the online world and the dotcom boom and bust, including a detour into the financial markets that Smith returns to repeatedly to punctuate descriptions of life at Pseudo. In between there are digressions into the early history of the internet: what it's like to be on a reality TV show; what it's like to watch Josh Harris do interviews and work on documentaries about his life that air at Sundance; whether being connected so much is making us shallow or revolutionising our relationship with products and marketing; and how people who have been worth millions and then lost it all in the crash deal with that.

This is a discursive account of the dotcom boom and crash. It tries to explain why it was possible, and throws in a fairly plausible theory about the stock market manipulation that may have fuelled and then destroyed the technology IPO market in the 1990s. Woven in and out is a rambling account of Psuedo.com and Josh Harris himself, who the author finds endlessly fascinating — an epilogue, an afterword and a postscript suggests that Smith found it hard to stop telling the story. If you don't find Harris equally fascinating, at least the book is stuffed with enough anecdotes, quotes and theories to make you an instant expert on some of the forgotten foundations of the web as we know it today.

Totally Wired: On the Trail of the Great dotcom Swindle
By Andrew Smith
Simon & Schuster
ISBN-13: 9781847374493
416 pages
£19.99 (hardback), £8.99 (paperback), £9.99 (e-book)

Humans still make the final decisions, but many of the mid-level people — the technicians who read scans, the A&R folks who pick out new artists to invest in — may be on the way out. Algorithms, argues Steiner, do a better job of predicting chart-topping songs, good investments, rare illnesses and political crises than even the most experienced and highly-trained humans.

Steiner opens with the big data equivalent of a joke: the 2011 incident in which the sale price of a $40 used book was bid up on Amazon by competing bots to more than $23 million. Then comes less of a joke: the 2010 'flash crash', in which automated trading briefly bonked the Dow average on the head. And then he plunges into history with the little-known figure of Thomas Peterffy, who first figured out that a properly primed computer could trade a lot faster than his human competitors. That discovery and its aftermath launched what Steiner calls "the 30-year tale of creeping algorithmic takeovers".

It's clear that Steiner expects the spread of algorithms to continue throughout the rest of human endeavours. This is less clear to me. For one thing, in many of the cases he covers there hasn't been much time to observe what happens next, or what kinds of failures we may find in the longer term. He does note that genuinely new and inventive music or movies may be passed over by algorithms that derive their ability to spot the gems in new work from findings identifying the basic characteristics of past hits. Still, humans can keep adapting systems in response to such failures. It didn't, for example, take many months after the flash crash for the markets to install 'circuit breakers' that halt trading if there are sudden large rises or falls indicative of runaway automated trading.

Where humans may get lucky lies in the problems that engineers think are worth solving. "The best minds of my generations [sic] are thinking about how to make people click on ads. That sucks," Harvard-educated mathematician Jeffrey Hammerbacher, tells Steiner. Hammerbacher's own career led from crunching data on Wall Street and Facebook to the chief scientist job at Cloudera to create data analytics software that can be applied to any problem, earth-shaking or pointless.

This is the hopeful note on which Steiner concludes: alienated from Wall Street by the 2008 crash and eager to do meaningful work with an impact on the world, many more of today's generation of young engineers will be moved to tackle important problems rather than solely lucrative ones. Maybe one of those problems will be finding employment for all those displaced folk.

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World
By Christopher Steiner
Penguin
248 pages
ISBN: 978-1-59184-492-1
£16.99

To be included among the nine studied here, algorithms had to meet specific criteria. They had to be in common, everyday use by ordinary computer users. They had to solve specific, real-world problems. They had to relate to computer science theory — that is, they couldn't just be about software or hardware. And they need to have an imaginative, ingenious leap — which MacCormick calls a "trick" — to make them work.

The subject areas covered by the algorithms are: search engine indexing; public key cryptography; error-correcting codes; pattern recognition; compression; databases; and digital signatures.

You may not recognise these as things you use every day, but indeed they are. Without error-correcting codes there would be no internet communications; without compression no DVDs; without public key cryptography no secure spontaneous online transactions between strangers; without databases no e-commerce or government benefits systems; without pattern recognition no spam filtering.

MacCormick leaves in a lot more detail than you'll usually find in a book aimed at a general audience.

MacCormick writes in a very clear, simple style, leading the reader step by step through even the most complex explanations. He does, of course, elide some aspects — no-one could fit a complete explanation of the inner workings of cryptography algorithms in a single chapter. Having said that, he leaves in a lot more detail than you'll usually find in a book aimed at a general audience. The result ought to be understandable to a wide variety of readers, including science and maths-oriented secondary school students.

At the end of the book, MacCormick spends a chapter exploring the limits of what can be computed, and these are pretty significant, as anyone who has studied computer science theory knows: it is provably impossible to write a program that can detect all possible crashes in another program (as a university sophomore, my computer science class was assigned this proof as one of a dozen problems to complete by the end of the semester). By "provably impossible", MacCormick is referring to the unique characteristic of his own field of mathematics, which is that once something is proven it stays proven — and mathematics is the base upon which computer science is built.

If those in charge of making public policy read only that last chapter, it would be a vast societal benefit. They would learn this: computers are not magic, after all, and expecting them to do the impossible is a good way to spend a lot of money on failed IT projects.

Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers
By John MacCormick
Princeton University Press
219pp
ISBN: 978-0-691-14714-7
$27.95

But what a business needs to know is not so much what Microsoft was thinking as what challenges and opportunities the new operating system will present. For the huge number of businesses that have stuck with Windows XP (recent figures show it neck-and-neck with Windows 7 at around 38 percent), this is a particularly important question. Support for XP ends in 2014: do you go for the known quantity of Windows 7, or jump an entire generation and head for the less-certain hills of Windows 8?

This is the question that long-serving technology journalists (and ZDNet bloggers) Mary Branscombe and Simon Bisson set out to answer in the interests of helping businesses make informed decisions.

As they say up front, Windows 8 Executive Summary is neither a replacement manual nor a lengthy review: instead, it's a guide to what Microsoft's new OS will and won't do for a business, written by people who've already spent more than 1,500 hours with the software.

The first point: if you were hoping that, despite its different look, Windows 8 isn't really much of a change, forget it. But, the authors argue, that's not necessarily a bad thing. If you do it right, your approach to IT infrastructure should undergo a transformation that helps your business innovate rather than simply solving problems in a piecemeal manner. Standardise, automate and consolidate.

To be fair, a lot of this material is not necessarily specifically about Windows 8. Whenever a major change in operating system comes along, it's an opportunity to implement a change of approach to IT. What Branscombe and Bisson are trying to get across, however, are the ways in which computing will change in the coming decade, for which Windows 8 is designed. Touchscreens will dominate, for example, as will mobile phones. One consequence is that it's no longer feasible to ban personal devices: data can't be protected by keeping it securely within a perimeter — instead, it must be protected wherever it happens to be, on whatever device.

By the end of this book, you may not like Windows 8 as much as Branscombe and Bisson seem to. But at least you'll be clear whether it's the devil you're going to need to know in the coming years.

Windows 8 Executive Summary: What Your Business Needs to Know
By Mary Branscombe and Simon Bisson
FairTrade DX
184pp
ISBN: 978-1-9384250-3-5
£13.59 (paperback) / £6.62 (Kindle edition)

Whether users are careless, deliberately tricked by a hacker or just finding a way to get their job done, sooner or later malicious software is going to turn up on a PC or a server. A PC you can reimage, but protecting your systems against attack means understanding the way you're being attacked. Practical Malware Analysis: The Hands-On Guide to Dissecting Malicious Software may be the definitive book on the subject at the moment, at least for Windows. It's comprehensive, practical and extremely well written.

Unlike many advanced security books, Practical Malware Analysis doesn't assume that you already know a lot about the field and the relevant tools, or even about the basics of the way executable files are compiled on Windows. You can start at the beginning and quickly get up to speed on static analysis of the code in malware samples, setting up virtual machines where you can safely run dynamic analyses of what malware actually does when it's running. Key tools from sandboxes to Process Monitor and Process Explorer, to network tools like Wireshark and INetSim, to disassemblers like IDA Pro and debuggers like WinDbg and OllyDbg are gathered into a useful annotated appendix.

Disassembling malware in order to understand what it's doing requires you to understand how Windows applications and processes work — from code, memory and the heap down to assembler, x86 instructions and the stack, and up to APIs and COM by way of the file system, registry and network stack. This is an excellent introduction to the Windows internals that will give you a clear understanding of what's going on inside Windows and how to think about security issues and protections in the operating system.

There's a much shorter section on 64-bit processing in the advanced topics at the end of the book — there are few examples of 64-bit malware, and as this is a practical approach we can't complain. However, security improvements in the Windows 8 kernel and memory management are likely to drive malware authors to the 64-bit world once Windows XP becomes less common, and when that happens we hope there will be a second edition covering this. For the PCs and the infections you'll be facing today and for the next year, concentrating on x86 and Windows XP makes perfect sense.

Simply reading through examples and instructions doesn't guarantee that you've understood the explanation, or that you can put that understanding into practice. Consequently, every chapter has three accompanying labs with practical exercises, questions and tips. These are graded into an analysis everyone should be able to manage, one that will stretch you slightly, and a third level that you'll have to work hard at and consult the solutions for — unless you're already an expert.

You get access to simulated malware samples so you can practice your techniques without compromising your system. However, there are plenty of details about real-world threats like the Poison Ivy backdoor, as well as an extensive survey of malware behaviour from hash dumping to grab security credentials to crack later, to hijacking legitimate DLLs by modifying the KnownDLLs key in the registry, to intercepting system messages to applications.

Increasingly, malware is encrypted, packed or otherwise encoded. There's a chapter on analysing and decrypting protected malware, but that's not the only way to tackle it. Often, encrypted malware uses a command-and-control network to make an infected system part of a botnet, and you can detect encrypted traffic and take countermeasures without necessarily decrypting all of the malware.

Working with malware that's designed to report back to the attacker means you run the risk of warning them that you're analysing their code. The book's useful suggestions about how to avoid that lead into dealing with malware that's designed to be hard to disassemble or debug, or that behaves differently when it detects it's running in a VM.

In general, this book does exactly what it promises on the cover; it's crammed with detail and has an intensely practical approach, but it's well organised enough that you can keep it around as handy reference. The explanations and solutions to the lab exercises make up a third of the book, and they're the next best thing to going to a security conference like BlackHat or Defcon and taking a workshop with a malware analyst. Even if understanding malware is only a small part of your job, this is the book to give you a solid grounding in the issues and techniques.

Practical Malware Analysis: The Hands-On Guide to Dissecting Malicious Software
By Michael Sikorski and Andrew Honig
No Starch Press
800 pages
ISBN: 978-1593272906
$59.95

Watson could hardly have been given greater or more admiring media coverage. But it's possible that Peter Sander, the author of What Would Steve Jobs Do? was living in a cave filled with Jobs' Reality Distortion Field at the time.

If you have ever travelled in the American South, you've probably seen the phrase "What Would Jesus Do?" on billboards, church signs and even personal jewellery, sometimes abbreviated to WWJD. The idea is that this is what you're supposed to ask yourself at moments of uncertainty: it makes Jesus your conscious role model. The conscious evocation of this slogan in this book's title tells you right off: this is not going to be a critical book about Jobs, his company or his leadership. Still, the man built one of the greatest business success stories of recent years, and so it's a legitimate question: what can business owners and managers learn from the decisions that Steve Jobs made, and how can they apply those lessons to the decisions they have to make every day? Can they, too, create an innovation culture in their companies?

Sander makes clear from the outset that he's not writing a either a biography of Jobs or a history of Apple. That's just as well. It's clear from the outset that Sander simply doesn't have the grasp of technical or historical detail to do either. Although it's possible some of the numerous small errors that grate could be put down to sloppy editing, claims such as the one early on that Apple had "virtually no acquisitions" ignores a history of dozens of acquisitions from 1988 to the present — acquisitions costing in the hundreds of millions of dollars, including such significant technologies as Siri, flash memory and music streaming.

The IBM comment above forms part of an argument that invention isn't enough by itself; innovation or changing the game requires inventing things with a customer and a marketable vision in mind. While it's certainly true that some companies have failed to exploit their inventions (Xerox being an obvious example), it's also true that without the basic research done by IBM and others the technologies that Apple fashions into innovative products would not exist.

Sanders' main effort, however, goes into distilling Jobs's work into some fairly basic advice. Have a vision. Understand what the customer doesn't yet know that he or she wants. Don't let research and development become cut off from the rest of the company. Find rule-breakers with passion. And so on.

If you like your business advice potted, this may be the book for you. But if you really want to understand Steve Jobs's business modus operandi, you might do better to study it in context. We'd recommend Charles Arthur's Digital Wars, which charts the comparative paths and fortunes of Apple, Google and Microsoft from 1998 to 2011, as a better bet.

What Would Steve Jobs Do? How the Steve Jobs Way Can Inspire Anyone to Think Differently and Win
By Peter Sander
McGraw Hill
215 pages
ISBN: 9780071792745
£14.99

Not all the hippies, pranksters and counter-revolutionaries wanted to live on communes and disdain profits — reclaiming the power of computing from faceless corporations and the military-industrial complex and using it for protests or communications is an idea that dates back to the student activists of the 60s. Dormehl does a good job of showing how the more practical and purist ideologies — which he dubs "hippy progressive capitalists" and "New Lefties" — mingled and spurred each other on.

But his account of the young Steve Jobs as aggressive, confrontational and disdainful of social niceties (from polite conversation to soap) feels sketchy, and various anecdotes about Jobs being dictatorial, controlling, unfair and yet charismatic and successful don't quite add up to the whole picture. There's more detail about his time at Reed College and Atari than in many Apple books, but the familiar story of how Jobs took over the Macintosh project only to lose control of the company has been better told, although not always with as many fascinating anecdotes. There are so many good stories about Steve Wozniak that even fans may not have heard all the ones recounted here — from 'phone phreaking' Richard Nixon to staging ill-fated music festivals.

The Apple Revolution does take a broader view than many books on Apple, covering NeXT, Pixar and the recruitment of Jonathan Ive (disappointed by the negative reception of his less-than-practical designs for toilets by Ideal Standard apparently, although it's a shame Dormehl misses out Ive's involvement in the eMate, whose design prefigures many elements of the iMac, in favour of details of his university career).

Cramming in all the interesting stories makes you want to keep reading, but leaves the book feeling inconsistent. The viewpoint jumps frequently and the amount of detail varies in a way that seems to make time dilate — Apple Writer author Paul Lutus's decision to move from NASA to the rural idyll of a cabin in Oregon gets as much space as the entire Apple CEO tenures of Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio, for example. This particularly affects the section on NeXT, which takes a rollercoaster ride from investment by EDS to aesthetic statement (every component had to be black) to delays, overspending and failure. There's more detail than you might expect on the creation of the ground-breaking 1984 advert and the "Think different" campaign, and a number of gaps in between, with Macs jumping from the SE/30 to the PowerBook offstage. The story of the iPhone has been told so many times that concentrating on details of the very uncountercultural secrecy and an anecdote about Jobs taking one of the first iPhones to a sick friend is both different and a little unbalanced.

One the other hand, the repeated attempts by Alvey Ray Smith and Ed Catmull to build hardware and software that would be powerful enough to animate a whole feature film are less well known and just as fascinating. Small errors here grate though: Dormehl makes the common mistake of thinking that TRON was computer-animated (the techniques were so slow that only a few minutes of the film were done on computer). Most of the stories match what we know from other sources, although Dorhmehl sets right some myths (John Sculley and Alan Kay were responsible for the prescient Knowledge Navigator video showing a voice-controlled tablet). However, several of the anecdotes Dormehl quotes from his many interviewees make more sense in the versions on the Apple history site folklore.org.

In the end, this is mostly a history of Apple, almost completely divorced from the wider world around it — even as a backdrop. Occasionally Dormehl goes back to the idea of counterculture and tries to find connections (whether the original Apple logo referenced Snow White, Alan Turing's suicide or the gay pride rainbow flag; how the voice actor in the first iPad commercial was once in a theatre group named for 17th-century religious radicals the Diggers), but mostly these attempts underline the contradiction between the success of Apple, the fanatical control and secrecy and the liberating ideals of the geeks who built and use Apple products.

Read The Apple Revolution for the stories rather than the writing. I'm not sure what "the recontextualisation of technology from tool of the military industrial academic complex to consumer product" has to do with people mistaking early video games like Pong for computer programs instead of single-purpose devices made from digital components; and if you're interested in the details of how the Macintosh was built you probably already know what a codename is. But learning that Steve Jobs was almost selected to fly the ill-fated Challenger space shuttle mission, or that when Doug Englebart (inventor of the mouse) took LSD he came up with a toilet-training aid called the Tinkle Toy, is worth the occasionally dense prose.

Generally The Apple Revolution manages to be both detailed and readable, but it doesn't really do what it promises, because the fascinating details don't get either the real-world context or the deeper analysis they need to turn this from insider anecdotes into cultural history.

The Apple Revolution: Steve Jobs, the counterculture and how the crazy ones took over the world
By Luke Dormehl
Virgin Books
532 pages
ISBN: 9780753540626
£12.99

About half of the new edition of the Microsoft Manual of Style is a comprehensive style guide covering everything from referring to 'arrow keys' rather than 'direction keys' to saying 'zoom out' rather than 'unzoom'. It updates and expands the previous editions considerably (they're far slimmer volumes), adding recent terms like NUI (Natural User Interface — using voice, touch and gestures to control a computer, which it points out is a clumsy term most people won't understand so you should explain it instead) as well as finally accepting that e-mail no longer has a hyphen.

Microsoft is obviously the expert on the correct naming of SQL Server and parts of the Windows interface (the area next to the Windows clock is the notification area, not the system tray, for example). On more generic terms you might not agree with every single style choice in the guide (few people are still hyphenating e-book and e-commerce for example, so we definitely disagree with the Microsoft Manual there), but the choices are deliberately labelled as being in Microsoft style or not rather than being wrong and right.

Overall it's a comprehensive guide that gives you a great starting place — and in most cases it's hard to argue with. Banning portmanteau words like 'weblication' and knowing when to use 'backup' and 'back up', but that you always write offline as a single word will improve any piece of technical writing. Saying laptop rather than notebook might seem a little pedantic, but having this list of around 1,000 style decisions means that you can think about how consistent you want to be. If you think saying notebook is fine, make a note and you can use this as the start of your custom style guide.

The other half of the book is a style manual in a much broader sense. It starts with an excellent explanation of why having a consistent style and voice is so helpful in technical documentation and interfaces. Again, you're probably not going to adopt the Microsoft style wholesale, but if you want a clear style for communicating, principles like avoiding too many questions, exclamation marks and colloquialisms is a good place to start. It's refreshing to see sections on avoiding stereotypes about race, gender and disability (far too much technical writing assumes all the readers are white, male and not long out of college). The advice to avoid anthropomorphising computers will make for clearer writing too — a speech recognition engine doesn't 'know' any words, and suggesting that it does is misleading.

If you're reviewing software, writing manuals or creating a user interface, the chapters on how to write and document dialog boxes and commands are full of useful checklists and tables on everything from the correct names for different controls to how to refer to file formats. The section on terminology for cloud computing is so clear it works as a handy summary of cloud technology (without any bias towards Microsoft services either). The exhaustive coverage of how to format numbers correctly might seem excessive, until you're trying to be consistent in a 300-page document when you'll be glad of them. There are suggested styles for captions, bibliographies, phone numbers, indexes and other things that are better when they're consistent. The sections on punctuation and grammar are clear and helpful without being pedantic about things like when the passive voice can be used. Sixteen pages of abbreviations and measurements (it's YB and ZB for yottabytes and zettabytes, for example) will save a lot of arguments as well.

The section on writing for the web is also helpful, with tips on how to organise content, what makes a good video, when a wiki is a good approach for community content and the basics of both search engine optimisation and social media marketing. Again, it's good to see guidelines on making content accessible; it doesn't cover everything you need to know, but you get the basics of organising content so it works with a screen reader and what's problematic for colour-blind readers (and notes about correct formatting for screen readers appears wherever it's relevant, not just in a section you might flip past in a hurry). This is a comprehensive guide to good technical writing that will make you think about communicating as well as getting your capitalisation right, even if you never use a single Microsoft product.

Microsoft Manual of Style, 4th edition
Elizabeth Whitmire
Microsoft Press
464 pages
ISBN 9780735648715
22.99

Mary Branscombe

It's been a long time since you could expect to stay with one company for most of your working life. But getting a new job — especially after you've been laid off — is harder than ever, even though plenty of companies are complaining that they can't get skilled workers. It's not just about finding the companies that need your skills; you also need to look at whether your skills are going to remain relevant in the future. Hoffman's explanation of the impact of technology and globalisation on careers and on the type of jobs that are available is an excellent summary of the issues.

Technology automates well-paid jobs that used to require knowledge and skills that took time to acquire; it creates new jobs — but not until some time after it's made previous jobs obsolete, and those new jobs usually need higher-level skills. And the jobs new technology doesn't make obsolete, it makes available to people around the world who can compete with you at a lower price. The potted history of the US car industry that's used to show the dangers of not changing your mindset will resonate more with US readers, but it's a fascinating look at management culture in what started out as the manufacturing equivalent of Silicon Valley.

Hoffman argues fairly convincingly that you're dealing with the same problems faced by the founders of new companies — uncertainty, constant change, limited information, support and resources — so you should use the same strategies as successful startups. In particular, he suggests imitating Google by staying in permanent beta: acknowledge that you have bugs and that you need to adapt, evolve and improve. Couched in the terms of the technology industry, this sounds less like a cheesy motivational speaker than you might expect, although there is a certain amount of that.

Hoffman certainly knows startups; beyond LinkedIn, he's invested in Zynga, Digg, Kiva, Milk (recently sold to Google) and Facebook. Don't look for juicy gossip though. There's not quite enough inside information on startups to make this a riveting read, although it's fun to learn that Netflix started because Reed Hastings was embarrassed to tell his wife how much it cost him to take Apollo 13 back to the video rental shop several days late, that the inspiration behind Groupon was how frustrating it was to try to cancel a mobile phone contract and that Airbnb's founders raised money by selling politically-themed breakfast cereal.

Some of the examples Hoffman chooses may not feel relevant to everyone. Sheryl Sandberg's progression from the World Bank to management consulting at McKinsey to the White House to Google to Facebook is impressive, but few of us are going to have Eric Schmidt review our career plans. Of course Hoffman does aim to summarise the advice for you: take a job where there's fast growth, because that creates opportunities and you can ride the momentum.

And the practical details of how to act like a startup are useful: how to understand your assets and whatever competitive advantages you have, and particularly how to evaluate risk. Again this is peppered with technology comparisons — you don't get a lot of depth, but a brief explanation of the way the cofounder of Twitter values design and simplicity helps to set priorities for products, keep customer experience consistent and attract employees with similar values is probably more useful than a detailed case study and keeps the book a fast read. He doesn't duck the fact that most of what startups have to do is contradictory; plan and be flexible, be passionate, persistent and adapt to customer needs and feedback. The advice to have plans but be prepared to stray from them makes more sense when he explains how this applied to the various iterations of PayPal before it became successful, and to his own attempts to find the perfect job at Apple (and then joining PayPal himself).

And the practical details really are practical; there are tasks (to do in the next day, week and month, Hoffman suggests) that should help you apply the principles yourself. Some of those use LinkedIn, most use common sense, but having a structure is a good place to start. Some of the book is almost a plea to use LinkedIn better. It may not surprise you to learn that you get a better response from someone on a dating site if you show you've actually read their profile and thought about their interests; the same is true for talking to people professionally as well.

If you've read a lot of technology and business books, you'll recognise a lot of the ideas in The Start-Up of You. If you haven't, they're well summarised and the overview gives you a useful context for understanding the technology business as well as a possible way to approach your own career. This book isn't going to change your life, but it might give you some useful ideas.

And if you're still wondering what LinkedIn is for, it's for professional relationships — which don't have to be purely self-interested, need to be genuine and are most useful if they're slightly outside your usual circle because you already know about all the opportunities there. Much like this book, then.

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career By Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha Random House Business Books ISBN: 978-1847940797 272 pages 12.99

Mary Branscombe

The pieces are not in chronological order, so one moment you're reading about Gibson having finally — finally in 1996 — and unwillingly acquired an email address (it came with his cable modem) and the next you're in Tokyo watching schoolgirls text madly on their mobiles. Readers apparently often ask Gibson why so much of his work set in Japan. "Because Japan is the global imagination's default setting for the future," he says.

In the commentaries Gibson has written for each piece and his introduction, he talks about the process by which he learned to write fiction. This involved, early on, rejecting two approaches: writing for free, and writing non-fiction. And yet these pieces happened because they provided the opportunity to go new places, meet new people and ask them questions. Who could resist that? Not Gibson, although one of the pleasures of the commentaries is his self-criticism.

"I feel I owe Wired an article about Japan," he writes after "My Own Private Tokyo" (2001). The magazine paid for his travel (ah, the old days, when journalists had expense accounts!), but the best stuff he collected got siphoned off into Pattern Recognition, the novel he was writing at the time. "I had very little idea of what I was talking about, when I wrote this," he says of another Wired piece, "My Obsession", about searching for the perfect watch on eBay.

Of course, Gibson fans need no prompting to want this collection, particularly for the first-appearance pieces. For those (apparently few) of us who, like me, grew up with space travel, rocket ships and distant planets, and struggle to get through even the greatest cyberpunk classics, Gibson's non-fiction is a revelation. I wish now that I'd known to seek it out in the early 1990s when digital hyperbole had the internet as the most important thing since the discovery of fire. Gibson has something that so many lack: the context of history, which, he writes in "Time Machine Cuba" (Infinite Matrix, 2006), he discovered simultaneously with science fiction as a child. Stories about the future, he writes in "The Road to Oceania" (New York Times, 2003), are really about the present in which they're written.

"Writing non-fiction, I feel like I'm applying latex paint to the living room walls with a toothbrush," writes Gibson in the introduction. He goes on to say that "the following pieces are performed on an African thumb piano", but composed "on one that has no name, and which I am yet to see." I've actually played an African thumb piano. It didn't sound anything like this book.

Distrust That Particular Flavor: Encounters with a Future That's Already Here
By William Gibson
Viking Penguin
258pp
ISBN: 978-0-670-92154-6
$27

Wendy M Grossman