Author: John Battelle

I have to admit that I am a bit of a google-phile. I like a lot of their products and a lot of the way they do business, so my overview may seem a bit positively biased. The book isn’t just a biography of the rise of Google though. It is more an examination of search, how it has changed our culture and uses Google (obviously) as the rat to study.

Battelle introduces a term he calls “Database of Intentions, which is the sum total of all queries that pour into search engines daily, revealing the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of our culture.” It is obvious in the book that Battelle is more interested in search in an anthropological sense more than Google itself, though a lion’s share of the book is focused on Google. He has a great blog about search that can be found here.

You can also get it on audiobook here.

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Author: 37signals

This is one of the best books on software design I have ever read. Though not necessarily the appropriate approach for all types of software design, it provides tons of great insight into how to efficiently and effectively build web applications. In the words of the 37signals “Anyone working on a web app — including entrepreneurs, designers, programmers, executives, or marketers — will find value and inspiration in this book.”

37signals is a web application software that has a refreshingly fresh take on software design. Instead of packing their products full of features, they keep them simple and easy-to-use, which in turn makes them more useful. I personally use a few of their products and wouldn’t ever switch back to previous solutions. The book even follows their simple mantra, it is easy to read without all the extra fluff that so many authors can’t seem to avoid.

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Author:James Surowiecki

Eric Schmidt from Google recommended this book in the “mistakenly” published powerpoint presentation slide notes from Google’s Analyst Day a couple of weeks ago. I had heard of it, but didn’t know much about it, so I did a little research and it seems like James Surowiecki, a writer for the New Yorker, has some great evidence (or maybe just ideas) about trusting the masses.

Surowiecki goes over types of crowd wisdom, types of crowd wisdom, and failures of crowd intelligence and how when certain factors combine, the wisdom of the crowd is much more accurate than the wisdom of individuals, even experts. One of the stories he uses to illustrate this is a study done in the 19th century by a British Anthropologist named Francis Galton. In the study he took an ox to a county fair and had people guess its weight. He also had cattle ranchers and farmer (experts) guess the weight. The general public as a whole did much better at guessing the weight than the so-called experts.

In the review snippets there is a link to Wikipedia’s entry for the book, which goes over these and other topics in a bit more detail. Also, from what I can tell, Wisdom of Crowds reads a lot like a Malcolm Gladwell book.

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Authors: Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox

I had a friend in college who lived, breathed and died economics. Everything in life, no matter what the subject, could be explained by economics. He recommended this book to me and it was one of the most intriguing business books I’ve ever read.

It is a novel about a Alex Rugo, a plant manager that learns the concepts of the Theory of Constraints from an ex-physics professor named Jonah. What is most interesting is that the book uses the storyline to teach about the theory of constraints rather than explaining the concepts in a textbook or standard business book style.

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