Engineering Technology

Tesla is the envy of the automotive world. Born at the start of the millennium, it was the first car company to be valued at $1 trillion. Its CEO, the mercurial, charismatic Elon Musk has become not just a celebrity but the richest man in the world. But Tesla’s success was far from guaranteed. Founded in the 2000s, the company was built on an audacious vision. Musk and a small band of Silicon Valley engineers set out to make a car that was quicker, sexier, smoother, and cleaner than any gas-guzzler on the road.

From mechanical looms to the combustion engine to the first computers, new technologies have always provoked panic about workers being replaced by machines. For centuries, such fears have been misplaced, and many economists maintain that they remain so today. But as Daniel Susskind demonstrates, this time really is different. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence mean that all kinds of jobs are increasingly at risk.

Simply put, an algorithm is a set of instructions-it's the code that makes computers run. A basic idea that proved elusive for hundreds of years and bent the minds of the greatest thinkers in the world, the algorithm is what made the modern world possible. Without the algorithm, there would have been no computer, no Internet, no virtual reality, no e-mail, or any other technological advance that we rely on every day.

In Decoding the Heavens, Jo Marchant tells for the first time the full story of the 100-year quest to decipher the ancient Greek computer known as the Antikythera Mechanism. Along the way she unearths a diverse cast of remarkable characters and explores the deep roots of modern technology in ancient Greece and the medieval European and Islamic worlds. At its heart, this is an epic adventure and mystery, a book that challenges our assumptions about technology through the ages.

Few books in computing have had as profound an influence on software management as "peopleware". The unique insight of this longtime best seller is that the major issues of software development are human, not technical. They’re not easy issues; but solve them, and you’ll maximize your chances of success. For this third edition, the authors have added six new chapters and updated the text throughout, bringing it in line with today’s development environments and challenges.

Scattered across the world, an elite team of code crackers is working tirelessly to thwart the defining cyber scourge of our time. You’ve probably never heard of them. But if you work for a school, a business, a hospital, or a municipal government, or simply cherish your digital data, you may be painfully familiar with the team’s sworn enemy: ransomware. Again and again, an unlikely band of misfits, mostly self-taught and often struggling to make ends meet, have outwitted the underworld of hackers who lock computer networks and demand huge payments in return for the keys.

A big source of tension between the US and China at the moment is technology. And one very small component is now at the centre of this battle for global dominance: the microchip. Controlling chip manufacturing in the 21st century may well prove to be like controlling the oil supply in the 20th. The country that controls this manufacturing can throttle the military and economic power of others. At the heart of this battle is ARM Holdings. The Everything Blueprint describes the titanic power struggle for control of the microchip.

Long before Margaret O'Mara became one of our most consequential historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the earliest days of the commercial Internet. There, she saw firsthand how deeply intertwined Silicon Valley was with the federal government - and always had been - and how shallow the common understanding of the secrets of the Valley's success actually was.

In the most authoritative book ever written about Apollo, David Whitehouse reveals the true drama behind the mission, telling the story in the words of those who took part - based around exclusive interviews with the key players. This enthralling book takes us from the early rocket pioneers to the shock America received from the Soviets' launch of the first satellite, Sputnik; from the race to put the first person into space, through President Kennedy's enthusiasm and later doubts, to the astronauts' intense competition to leave the first footprint.

With his signature wit and thought-provoking insights, Neil deGrasse Tyson - one of our foremost thinkers on all things space - illuminates the past, present, and future of space exploration and brilliantly reminds us why NASA matters now as much as ever. As Tyson reveals, exploring the space frontier can profoundly enrich many aspects of our daily lives, from education systems and the economy to national security and morale.

The profession of Agile Coaching is, in a word, confusing. Bob Galen has written Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coaching to help alleviate the confusion. The book centers on the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel as the competency and skill maturity model to baseline your agile coaching skills against. Its core goal is to “raise the bar” as to what true excellence looks like and to help you establish a personal development and growth plan. Consider this book that maps to coaching badassery, personal growth, and client service.

C# in Depth is a revised edition of the bestseller written by C# legend Jon Skeet. This authoritative and engaging guide is your key to unlocking this powerful language, including the new features of C# six and seven. In it, Jon introduces expression-bodied members, interpolated strings, pattern matching, and more. Real-world examples drive it all home. By the end of this awesome book, you'll be writing C# code with skill, style, and confidence.

Go in Action is for any intermediate-level developer who has experience with other programming languages and wants a jump-start in learning Go or a more thorough understanding of the language and its internals. This book provides an intensive, comprehensive, and idiomatic view of Go. It focuses on the specification and implementation of the language, including topics like language syntax, Go's type system, concurrency, channels, and testing.

Cloud Native Patterns is your guide to developing strong applications that thrive in the dynamic, distributed, virtual world of the cloud. This audiobook presents a mental model for cloud-native applications, along with the patterns, practices, and tooling that set them apart. Cloud platforms promise the holy grail: Near-zero downtime, infinite scalability, short feedback cycles, fault-tolerance, and cost control. But how do you get there? Learn these fundamental patterns and practices, and you’ll be ready to thrive in the dynamic, distributed, virtual world of the cloud.

Timepieces have long accompanied us on our travels, from the depths of the oceans to the summit of Everest, the ice of the arctic to the sands of the deserts, outer space to the surface of the moon. The watch has sculpted the social and economic development of modern society; it is an object that, when disassembled, can give us new insights both into the motivations of inventors and craftsmen of the past, and, into the lives of the people who treasured them.

The Secret Science of Games is an accessible and entertaining guide to the hidden role of science in making games more fun. User experience (UX) research is a vital part of the story of how video games have become a cultural juggernaut, but game developers generally don’t speak publicly about how data shapes game design and game development.

Sociologist Felicia Wu Song has spent years considering the personal and collective dynamics of living in digital ecosystems. In this book she combines psychological, neurological, and sociological insights with theological reflection to explore two major questions: What kind of people are we becoming with personal technologies in hand? And who do we really want to be? Song unpacks the soft tyranny of the digital age, including the values embedded in our apps and the economic systems that drive our habits and their subtle yet pervasive effects.

Mastering Professional Scrum is for anyone who wants to deliver increased value by using Scrum more effectively. Leading Scrum practitioners Stephanie Ockerman and Simon Reindl draw on years of Scrum training and coaching to help you return to first principles and apply Scrum with the professionalism required to achieve its transformative potential. The authors aim to help you focus on proven Scrum approaches for improving quality, getting and using fast feedback, and becoming more adaptable, instead of “going through the motions” and settling for only modest improvements.

In the final decades of the 19th century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America's Gilded Age - Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse - battled as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empires of Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death, and hard-eyed Wall Street millionaires.

K. Eric Drexler is the founding father of nanotechnology - the science of engineering on a molecular level. In Radical Abundance, he shows how rapid scientific progress is about to change our world. Thanks to atomically precise manufacturing, we will soon have the power to produce radically more of what people want, and at a lower cost. The result will shake the very foundations of our economy and environment.