computers – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Systems Analysis & Design

By Scott J. Pearson | July 23, 2024July 23, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Information technology (IT) is a fast-moving industry. Its impact on the modern world is also immense, whether in personal, business, or governmental domains. Almost no medium-sized businesses can survive without a robust IT policy. Despite being critical, those interested in joining the IT workforce will find their skills, gained through education, become quickly outdated. Twenty-five years ago, I gained knowledge from textbooks like this by earning a bachelor’s degree in computer science, yet the field…

The Philosopher of Palo Alto: Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC & the Original Internet of Things

By Scott J. Pearson | May 18, 2023August 13, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Palo Alto sits at the center of Silicon Valley as the world capital of technological development. In the final decades of the twentieth century, Xerox’s PARC labs held an eminent place within its culture and helped expand ideas like Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and “ubiquitous computing.” The man who coined the latter phrase is Mark Weiser, a late scholar whose work I was not intimately acquainted with until reading this work. In this biography of…

Software-Technology

Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

By Scott J. Pearson | November 26, 2020August 13, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Software developers are typically bright people but possess few social contacts who approach the world like them. Such loneliness is famously parodied by stereotypes. Even the most social among us have a difficult time relating to others what programming is like. In this work, Seibel provides interviews with 15 accomplished programmers and alleviates some of that alone-ness. In so doing, he explains to the English-speaking world how computer programming has grown and is currently practiced.…

Healthcare History Science Software-Technology

Life Out of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics

By Scott J. Pearson | March 29, 2020March 29, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

Upon reading the title of this book, many non-specialists might rightly ask, “What is bioinformatics? And why does it deserve its own history?” For the first question, bioinformatics is the application of computer technology to biological studies, and I hope that reading this review will answer the second question. Many of us were taught hypothesis-driven biology in school – that is, we were taught to ask a well-formed question, perform an experiment, and confirm/deny the…

Software-Technology

The Soul of a New Machine

By Scott J. Pearson | January 17, 2020January 17, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

This work, written about four decades ago, tells the true tale of how a team of computer engineers built a new computer. In an era contemporaneous to Apple Computer’s founding, Data General computers built affordable new computers for the masses. A group of engineers built a new circuit board that eventually pushed itself to the forefront of the market. This book is about engineers and the culture of engineering more than anything else. It’s about…