Лучшие книги Стивена Леви

Билл Гейтс, Стив Возняк, Марвин Минский и другие герои компьютерной революции 1980-х годов рассказывают о том, как боролись с существующими порядками, формировали новые и боролись с законом за право свободного доступа к информации.
Стивен Леви поговорил с тремя поколениями бывших хакеров, чтобы вы из первых уст узнали:
- Как создавались первые персональные компьютеры?
- Почему известные изобретатели бросали университеты?
- Можно ли считать хакеров киберпреступниками?
- Какие "хакерские" ценности объединяли и продолжают объединять гиков по всей планете?
- Зачем крупнейшие технологические компании по сей день нанимают на работу профессиональных хакеров?
- Почему сеть, какую мы ее знаем, невозможна без хакерской культуры?
И многое другое об истоках компьютерной индустрии и рождении технологических гигантов эпохи цифровизации, например, Apple и Microsoft.

Сюжет о том, как молодой студент Гарварда придумал крупнейшую социальную сеть в мире, уже вошел в учебники по предпринимательству. Могущество и вездесущность компании Марка Цукерберга, которую в 2021 году он переименовал в Meta (признана экстремистской организацией в России), невозможно отрицать. Как и за счет чего стартап стал корпорацией стоимостью более триллиона долларов? Известный журналист Стивен Леви три года общался с сотрудниками Facebook (признана экстремистской организацией в России), включая самого Цукерберга и операционного директора Шерил Сэндберг, чтобы рассказать самую полную историю компании из Пало Альто. Его книга — о невероятных успехах и фатальных неудачах, о бесконтрольной власти и шокирующих методах работы, об амбициях и идеализме людей, чей продукт изменил интернет и поставил под угрозу идею анонимности. Она о том, как шаг за шагом компания становилась частью нашего мира и что произошло, когда ей это удалось.

Google is arguably the most important company in the world today, with such pervasive influence that its name is a verb. The company founded by two Stanford graduate students—Larry Page and Sergey Brin—has become a tech giant known the world over. Since starting with its search engine, Google has moved into mobile phones, computer operating systems, power utilities, self-driving cars, all while remaining the most powerful company in the advertising business.
Granted unprecedented access to the company, Levy disclosed that the key to Google’s success in all these businesses lay in its engineering mindset and adoption of certain internet values such as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk-taking. Levy discloses details behind Google’s relationship with China, including how Brin disagreed with his colleagues on the China strategy—and why its social networking initiative failed; the first time Google tried chasing a successful competitor. He examines Google’s rocky relationship with government regulators, particularly in the EU, and how it has responded when employees left the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups.
In the Plex is the “most authoritative…and in many ways the most entertaining” (James Gleick, The New York Book Review) account of Google to date and offers “an instructive primer on how the minds behind the world’s most influential internet company function” (Richard Waters, The Wall Street Journal).

Few companies in history have ever been as successful and as admired as Google, the company that has transformed the Internet and become an indispensable part of our lives. How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes readers inside Google headquarters—the Googleplex—to show how Google works. While they were still students at Stanford, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin revolutionized Internet search. They followed this brilliant innovation with another, as two of Google’s earliest employees found a way to do what no one else had: make billions of dollars from Internet advertising. With this cash cow (until Google’s IPO nobody other than Google management had any idea how lucrative the company’s ad business was), Google was able to expand dramatically and take on other transformative projects: more efficient data centers, open-source cell phones, free Internet video (YouTube), cloud computing, digitizing books, and much more. The key to Google’s success in all these businesses, Levy reveals, is its engineering mind-set and adoption of such Internet values as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk taking. After its unapologetically elitist approach to hiring, Google pampers its engineers—free food and dry cleaning, on-site doctors and masseuses—and gives them all the resources they need to succeed. Even today, with a workforce of more than 23,000, Larry Page signs off on every hire. But has Google lost its innovative edge? It stumbled badly in China—Levy discloses what went wrong and how Brin disagreed with his peers on the China strategy—and now with its newest initiative, social networking, Google is chasing a successful competitor for the first time. Some employees are leaving the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups. Can the company that famously decided not to be evil still compete? No other book has ever turned Google inside out as Levy does with In the Plex.

The author of Hackers chronicles the two-decades-old battle to wrest control of information from government that paired the nation's computer-adept elite with big business. 40,000 first printing.

The iPod has become a full-blown cultural phenomenon, giving us a new vocabulary (we shuffle our iTunes on our nanos), revolutionizing the way we experience music and radio through the invention of podcasting, opening up new outlets for video, and challenging the traditional music industry as never before. The design itself has become iconic: there is even a shade of white now called iPod White.

Steven Levy has had rare access to everyone at Apple who was involved in creating the iPod -- including Steve Jobs, Apple's charismatic cofounder and CEO, whom he has known for over twenty years. In telling the story behind the iPod, Levy explains how it went from the drawing board to global sensation. He also examines how this deceptively diminutive gadget raises a host of new technical, legal, social, and musical questions (including the all-important use of one's playlist as an indicator of coolness), and writes about where the iPhenomenon might go next in his new Afterword. Sharp and insightful, The Perfect Thing is part history and part homage to the device that we can't live without.

Now in it's seventh edition, this OB reader continues to both instruct and entertain the current generation of students and professionals about workplace realities. This book consists of a series of short, interwoven stories about the operations at a single, mythical company seen through the eyes of an employee. It reveals the psychological processes and social mores at work in a company, and it is uniquely valuable for helping to bridge the gap between theory and practice. It immerses readers in the "real-world" workplace as no other text does, and provides just enough theory to make sense of it. The new edition will continue with the same premise and will contain updated stories and chapters.

The creation of the Mac in 1984 catapulted America into the digital millennium, captured a fanatic cult audience, and transformed the computer industry into an unprecedented mix of technology, economics, and show business. Now veteran technology writer and Newsweek senior editor Steven Levy zooms in on the great machine and the fortunes of the unique company responsible for its evolution. Loaded with anecdote and insight, and peppered with sharp commentary, Insanely Great is the definitive book on the most important computer ever made. It is a must-have for anyone curious about how we got to the interactive age.