What good biographies about people in IT are there?

I Con" is very appropriate for mr. jobs... Truly a fitting title - in all meanings – Tim Jul 7 '09 at 15:40.

This is a great book about Linus Torvalds: Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary.

2 I've got this book, its both interesting and funny – daz-fuller Jul 7 '09 at 14:48.

Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists, includes Backus, McCarthy, Dijkstra, Knuth, Tarja, Lamport, Kay and 8 more famous names: a chapter on each so not full biographies but a useful introduction to each one.

Okay so it's a TV program, but I found Triumph of the Nerds to be very interesting.

Great program! Well worth the watch. – Alan Jul 7 '09 at 15:02.

Soul of a new machine Fire in the valley There is also some interesting stuff in "Founders at work" - most interesting to me is the contrast between bright people like the RIM guys, Adobe guys and Woz on one hand and the lucky web startups that just made money by being in the right place on the other. Some of those guys shouldn't even be in the same book. I'd recommend the first two, but not sure I would recommend spending for the founders at work.

Cuckoo's egg is a pretty good read. I found the biography of Nicola Tesla to be amazing as well.

A video not a book, autobiography, a C.S. professor (not I.T.): Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.

Show Stopper! : The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft by G. Pascal Zachary is a great read.It's a biography of Windows NT, but contains mini bios on Dave Cutler and many of his development team members and their families.

Not quite a biography but a lot more: The Annotated Turing.

Also not quite a biography, rather a string of parts of biographies that make up an epic story: "Hackers" by Steven Levy. On the same vein, "A story of Modern Computing" by Paul Ceruzzi.

I forgot the hackers book in my list. – Tim Jul 7 '09 at 15:38.

It's not out quite yet but I'm looking forward to Coders at Work by Peter Seibel.

Founders at Work is very good too, even if it's based more on the business side of IT. – tmoisan Jul 11 at 20:40.

Not exactly a person's biography, but rather Logic's (and IMHO Computer Science's) biography. It's worth the time. Logicomix.

I once found it interesting to read Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM, about IBM and the start of the PC industry. It's not a biography about any one specific person, but similar (about history and people).

See the biographies in wikipedia e. G: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_in... , en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computer_... , etc...

These links do not refer to books - but Wikipedia biographies. – Kjensen Jul 7 '09 at 16:35.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.