Peter Seibel is working on a book, “Coders at Work”, that will “contain interviews with around sixteen of the most interesting computer programmers alive today”. He has a page that lists 284 programmers, with links to more info on each one, that I think is worth perusing:
Peter is the author of Practical Common Lisp which I highly recommend.
Also see his Google Talk on Common Lisp.
Robert Scoble has created three video interviews with Tom Rolander (and a few other folks) dealing with early PC industry history. Who is Tom Rolander? He’s the guy who was flying with Gary Kildall when IBM came calling. The end of the story is that Microsoft got the OS deal with IBM. The video series fills in some of the blanks 
Aren’t familiar with this story? You should read: Hard Drive
A couple other good tech history books are:
Nerds 2.0.1
Dealers of Lightning
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
I first noticed the covers of the “Head First” book series from O’Reilly a while ago, and I thought they looked unprofessional and simplistic, so I never really looked into them. Interestingly, I try to be careful about not being biased by nice book covers, but I think I’m more susceptible to dismissing books with “bad” covers.
I researched HTML books recently to help my aesthetically gifted wife get started designing web pages and the Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML title got great reviews on Amazon, so she picked up a copy.
I thought I’d flip through the book, and I ended up reading the entire thing I really wish this book was available years ago when I started coding HTML; it’s an incredibly well written tutorial. It has a very unique style which the authors spend quite a few pages explaining:
Based on the latest research in cognitive science, neurobiology, and educational psychology, learning takes a lot more than text on a page. We know what turns your brain on.
After reading the book, I tend to agree with their approach. It was a very fun and informative read. Most of the book was review for me since I’ve spent years learning this stuff the hard way, but there were a handful of excellent points I learned from the book, and I understand a lot of the foundational aspects of XHTML & CSS much better than I did before. Expecting a newbie to get through a typical HTML reference book is unrealistic IMO.
For anyone wanting to learn the basics of (X)HTML & CSS, or would like a good review, I highly recommend this book. I don’t know if the other books in the “Head First” series are as good, but I’ll certainly consider them in the future based on my experience with this one.
UPDATE: I have found one thing to criticize about the book. The index leaves a lot to be desired. This is a particularly grievous deficiency with this book since it is organized as a tutorial as opposed to a reference book.
About five years ago, in an effort to organize my library and be able to share titles of interest with other people, I created a simple XML file to catalog my books. Using an XML file allowed me to easily transform the data to be displayed on a web page, but it was time consuming since I had to type everything in by hand, and over the years it stagnated and I stopped updating it. I recently thought I’d update the file, but before I got around to doing it, a friend of mine (Chip H.), mentioned LibraryThing.com, so I checked it out.
It was incredibly easy to use - just type in the ISBN (or other info such as title), and LibraryThing will grab the rest of the data from Amazon or the Library of Congress. Alternatively, you can buy an inexpensive bar code scanner and scan the bar code on a book to save a little typing. The price is free for 200 books or less, but I found it so useful, I signed up for a lifetime membership for $19. They say the lifetime membership is $25, but when you go to pay you’re given a choice of amounts, so I naturally picked the lowest one.
You can see a partial tag cloud of my books below. I haven’t spent much time tagging, but it will give you somewhat of an idea of the type of books I have. Click on one of the tags to see a list of my books with that tag:
The full tag cloud is: here
You can also rate & review books. I found it fascinating to see which of my books were most/least in common with other people on the site. They have over 170,000 users and 11 million books in the system, so you can get some pretty good statistics. I have 48 titles that no one else on the site has (or possibly wants ).
They provide an export capability so you can obtain a tab-delimited text file or csv file, and there are a lot of other features that I haven’t tried out, but just the ability to import book data by typing an ISBN number was enough to get me hooked.
UPDATE: the site is listed as ‘beta’, but I haven’t experienced any issues until today. Andrea just gave me a list of 130 ISBN numbers, so I used the import facility to import them all. It worked fine, and Andrea was able to tag most of the imported books, but I just discovered that the public can’t view any of the imported books. I emailed LT; I’ll be interested in seeing how long it takes them to fix this bug.
As I was typing this update, I was notified of an email response from Tim (the owner) who stated he’d take a look at it tomorrow
UPDATE: Tim has fixed the problem I had with imported books not being visible. Now there is a minor problem with tags containing & characters. I expect that will be fixed shortly.